- Joined
- Aug 18, 2003
- Messages
- 10,789
- Reaction score
- 13,458
It looks like Theresa May is about to face a vote of no confidence due to her betraying the British people with not carrying through with Brexit. This is going to be good. The vote is tommorow.
https://www.ft.com/content/4747d538-fdda-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e521
https://www.ft.com/content/4747d538-fdda-11e8-aebf-99e208d3e521
Theresa May is facing a dramatic vote of confidence in her leadership on Wednesday evening, after Eurosceptic MPs launched a coup attempt against the prime minister to try to seize control of the final stages of Brexit. Tory rebels have secured the 48 names needed to trigger a confidence vote and Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the backbench 1922 committee, has announced it will take place between 6pm-10pm on Wednesday. Mrs May is expected to fight for her job, but support has been draining away from the prime minister since Monday when she abandoned a planned vote in the House of Commons on her Brexit plan. If Mrs May fails to secure 158 votes - a majority of Tory MPs - she will be forced to stand down and a full Tory leadership contest would take place. Ministers loyal to the prime minister were dismayed at the prospect of a leadership challenged on Tuesday night. “If this happened it would be an act of irresponsibility, foolishness and national vandalism,” said one minister. Another minister said: “I’m certain she would fight.” Mrs May faces MPs at question time at 12pm on Wednesday and had been expected to chair a scheduled cabinet meeting where ministers will address planning for a no deal exit — an outcome made more likely by the continuing parliamentary impasse over a deal. If Mrs May lost a vote of confidence or decided to resign it would plunge the party into a formal leadership contest; there is no clear frontrunner to replace her and any contest would be highly divisive and could take weeks to play out. One cabinet minister said: “To use up the time we have left [before Brexit on March 29 2019] with this would be deeply irresponsible.” Brexit: can Theresa May rescue the deal? Mrs May toured EU capitals on Tuesday trying to win “assurances” that any use of the Irish backstop in Britain’s withdrawal treaty would be temporary, but Eurosceptic Tory MPs believe she now needs to take a different approach. She is expected to travel to Dublin on Wednesday to meet Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar, ahead of a two-day European Council meeting starting on Thursday. Mrs May claimed after a whistle-stop tour of European capitals to be “just at the start” of a renegotiation of her deal, while EU leaders insisted that there was no scope for fundamental changes. Mrs May postponed a crunch Commons vote on her deal on Monday at the last minute in the face of an impending defeat; at that moment the mood among Tory MPs towards the prime minister darkened considerably. In a sign of the growing danger to Mrs May, former cabinet minister Owen Paterson submitted a letter claiming that the prime minister had treated Brexit “miserably” and that she saw it as “a problem to be solved rather than an opportunity to be grasped”. Mr Patterson added in an interview on the BBC: “I’m just exasperated. She’s got completely stuck on this backstop.” He said that the Conservative party could oust Mrs May and elect a new leader by “mid-January”. Martin Vickers, a Tory Brexiter, said: “She is in danger. I personally know of two letters which went in last night.” Brexiters believe a new prime minister is needed to oversee Britain’s exit from the EU and are willing to see Britain leave without a formal deal on March 29. Ben Bradley, a Tory MP said that if a confidence vote was triggered then the party should “crack on, elect a new leader and deliver the Brexit that people voted for.” But a new Eurosceptic Tory prime minister would face exactly the same parliamentary arithmetic as Mrs May and the prospect of inheriting a party at war with itself over Europe. The House of Commons is a primarily pro-European legislature with many MPs warning they would attempt to block a no deal exit.