Theresa may won’t be given any more chances to fail. The tory party will see to that. | thearticle

Theresa May has survived more scrapes than the proverbial cat with nine lives, but last Thursday her luck finally ran out. The loss of over 1300 Conservative councillors in the local

elections, with the near-certainty of an even worse humiliation at the European elections in prospect, has set the stage for a coup against the Prime Minister. Unlike last December’s failed

attempt, which foundered after a botched vote of no confidence in her leadership, this time nobody is disposed to give Mrs May the benefit of the doubt. There is nothing like the casting of

millions of real votes — and thousands of spoiled ballot papers — to concentrate minds in Westminster. She, and she alone, is blamed for the fact that the Tories now face electoral

annihilation. Nothing daunted, the Prime Minister is pressing ahead with her bid to persuade Jeremy Corbyn to do a deal. The carrot she is dangling before him is a “temporary” customs union

and a “dynamic” approach to workers’ rights. But this carrot is too mouldy to tempt even the herbivorous Labour leader. He knows that any deal with Mrs May is conditional on her remaining in

office long enough to implement it. The likelihood of that happening is vanishingly small. So, too, is the chance of Corbyn taking the bait. John McDonnell put it yesterday, “We’re dealing

with a very unstable government.” If Labour won’t save her from her own party, the Prime Minister does have one last card to play. She could set a date for her own departure, as the 1922

Committee of Tory MPs is likely to demand as soon as tomorrow. But she could play for time by postponing any leadership election until the autumn, after the party conference season. That

brings us close to the EU’s deadline of October 31. By then, a version of the Withdrawal Agreement must have been ratified by Parliament, or Britain will leave without a deal. Mrs May

presumably hopes that she will still be in Downing Street to take Brexit finally “over the line”. But how likely is that to happen, when her own party — and, if last week’s results are

anything to go by, the country — no longer trusts her to deliver anything? Indeed, the Conservatives are now resolved to rid themselves of a leader whose legacy will not, they fear, be

Brexit, but a Corbyn government. Last week’s results would, if reproduced in a general election, produce a very different Parliament from the present one: still “hung”, but with Labour

having almost as many seats as the Tories. In such a scenario, Corbyn could form a coalition, either with the Scottish National Party or perhaps the Liberal Democrats, depending on the

parliamentary arithmetic. It is not hard to imagine the power-hungry Corbynistas promising just about any inducement — referendums, proportional representation, jobs in Cabinet — just to get

their man into Downing Street. Once they had occupied the “commanding heights”, a revolutionary vanguard is very hard to evict. The myrmidons of Momentum would be here to stay. It is this

alarming prospect, even more than the evanescence of independence from Brussels, that is now motivating Tory minds at every level of the party. Once even ministers get the message, the

payroll vote that sustained Mrs May in office last December will melt away. There will, in all probability, be no repetition of that confidence vote. This time it is likely to be even

nastier, more brutish and extremely short: the Prime Minister would be told by her parliamentary managers and closest allies in Cabinet that the game was up and she had to go, giving her no

choice but to resign immediately. On a bright May morning exactly forty years ago, Margaret Thatcher entered Downing Street. Eleven years later, having transformed Britain beyond

recognition, she was unceremoniously evicted by her own colleagues. Does anyone suppose that the same party that destroyed Britain’s first female Prime Minister would not do the same to the

second?