The delay accentuates the sensation that Brexit, and British politics, is now entering a black hole, in which anything is possible. May is not an enthralling figure. Her flaws are plain to see. But her strategy for steering the nation through its deepest and most complex political crisis of the past half-century has functioned until this moment. May took office in 2016, shortly after the U.K. unexpectedly voted to leave the E.U. Earlier this year, she began to reveal a series of messy compromises that would achieve Brexit but allow Britain to stay more or less entwined with its largest trading partner. Several ministers, including Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, and David Davis, the Brexit negotiator, resigned. But May’s plan, and her leadership, remained intact. Her Conservative government, which does not have a majority in Parliament, won every vote that it needed to, sometimes by a slim margin, and the mighty business progressed. That changed with the publication of May’s final deal, the result of eighteen months of agonizing negotiations with the E.U., on November 14th. Since then, the authority has been whooshing out of Downing Street like air from a balloon. In eleven years in office, Margaret Thatcher lost four votes in the House of Commons. Last Wednesday, in a prelude to the main event this week, May suffered three Brexit-related defeats in sixty-three minutes. [...]
The thing that pro-Brexit M.P.s really loathe about May’s deal is a protocol, known as “the Irish backstop,” that deals with the U.K.’s border with Ireland. The backstop, an insurance policy in case future negotiations break down, could leave Britain inside the E.U.’s customs union, theoretically forever. Although neither side wants this, Brexiteers have come to regard the backstop as inevitable, like millenarians contemplating an ill sign. “It will precede the breakup of the Union,” Dorries said in Parliament. She was followed by Angus MacNeil, of the Scottish National Party, who compared Brexit to a piece of Laurel and Hardy slapstick. “Crazy, silly, nuts, wacky, cuckoo, potty, daft, cracked, dippy, bonkers—the list goes on,” MacNeil said. “In Gaelic, I could say that it is gòrach, faoin, amaideach, caoicheil, air bhoil—the list again goes on.” Damian Green, a former Conservative minister who in 2017 briefly served as May’s de-facto deputy, was one of the few voices to support the Prime Minister. Green warned of the risks that would follow if Parliament voted down May’s agreement, including the danger of Britain leaving the E.U. next spring with no deal at all, a calamity that would threaten food supplies, crash the pound and bring about a prolonged recession. “I am afraid,” Green said. “I am afraid for my constituents and my country if no deal is where we find ourselves in March.” [...]
If May can’t change her deal, then something else will have to give. In recent weeks, as the Prime Minister’s problems have mounted, talk has increased of a general election or—more breathlessly—a second referendum on leaving the E.U. Both would come with their own complications, and both would require the support of the House of Commons, which is in short supply for anything at the moment. As things stand, the only part of Brexit written into Britain’s statute books is a time and a date: 11 p.m., March 29, 2019. Unless a plan is agreed to, the U.K. will crash out of the E.U. without a formal economic or diplomatic relationship of any kind—a previously unthinkable scenario that becomes more thinkable with each passing day. “The problem is that Brexit is everything but rationality,” the E.U. official told me. This afternoon, the pound fell to a twenty-month low against the dollar. May said that she would step up contingency planning for a no-deal Brexit as she plots her final, desperate negotiation. “If we will the ends, we must also will the means,” she told M.P.s. But Britain is a country that only knows what it doesn’t want. Without an end, there are no means. And there is no safety in sight.
