https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/theresa-mays-brexit-policy-change-or-be-voted-out/
Either she will have to change her Brexit policy, or her party will change its leader.
When Prime Minister Theresa May danced onto the stage at the Tory conference yesterday to speak to the assembled Tories, she did so as a leader whom 80 percent of Conservatives want to see replaced before the next election. Admittedly, polls show that only about one-third of Tories said they wanted her replaced at once. An easygoing 40 percent would be content if she departed sometime between now and July 2022. Still, only one-fifth of Tories want May to stay leader past that point. They’re old-fashioned: They disapprove of assisted suicide.
Even so, anyone who knows the Tory party will find this level of internal opposition extraordinary. Grassroots Tories have traditionally been deferential — they know their place — and Tory MPs have been clever at disguising their opposition until some dramatic event gives them license to rebel respectably. Election defeats usually provide this: Alec Douglas-Home, Ted Heath, John Major, William Hague, Michael Howard, and David Cameron all fell in this way.
Theresa May did not actually lose the 2017 election — she led Labour by two points in the popular vote — but she lost her party’s parliamentary majority in an election that was generally expected to produce a Tory landslide. That near-defeat was plainly attributable both to her own robotic campaign performance and to her policies — such as the so-called “dementia tax” that alienated older voters, a natural Tory constituency. She should have been defenestrated then.
May was able to hold on as PM because Conservatives thought she would unite the party in support of implementing Brexit, after which she would smilingly resign and be given the credit for a historic achievement. That was naïve, of course: What political leader resigns after a great achievement? But what no one then expected is that May would pursue a policy designed to ensure that Brexit never occurs — or that what does occur is Remain lightly disguised as Brexit, or worse.
Worse than Remain? Well, yes. May’s Brexit proposals — now known as “Chequers,” after the PM’s country house, where they were imposed on a surprised cabinet days after May had personally assured the secretary of state for exiting the EU that she had no such intentions — would effectively keep Britain inside the EU’s single market (i.e., by accepting its current and future regulations) and its customs union, and keep it subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice while forfeiting its votes in all EU institutions.
Not enough for you? Then ponder this: The London Times has reported that the government is now prepared to cut a deal with the EU that would prevent a post-Brexit U.K. from reaching free-trade deals with other countries such as Australia, Canada, and . . . the United States. Such a deal would breach the reddest of red lines laid down by Theresa May and the Tory party since the 2016 referendum. Yet no one thinks the report is mistaken. And May has continued to say in interviews that final agreement with the EU will require concessions from both sides. But what has May left to concede?
