Quote Originally Posted by Burney View Post
I think pretty much everyone believes this is what the EU will do. However, it is a high-risk manoeuvre that still allows plenty of scope for failure.
If (as seems likely) May needs Labour votes to get her deal, she will be widely seen as having betrayed her party, membership and a large proportion of her voters and her position will be largely untenable. She would almost certainly then have to stand down (the knives will be out as soon as Brexit - in whatever form - is delivered. The tory party will probably never recover from such an outcome (but it's arguable that that was always likely to have been the case given its fundamental splits on this issue - which will by that stage have destroyed every Tory PM since Heath).
Now, you may say she's 'made a good fist' of an impossible situation and from a purely dispassionate view that may be the case. However, politics is not a dispassionate business and the fact is that she may well go down in history as the Prime Minister who broke the Tory party and let Jeremy Corbyn into Downing St. Given which, I would question how well she would be viewed by posterity.
I thought there had been an agreement that she tries to deliver Brexit and then steps down? I would have thought that delivering her deal and then stepping aside for someone electable would put the Tories in a very strong position, no?

Certainly given how badly Labour has performed on the Brexit front and who their leader is I would have thought the Tories would be looking at a majority.