UK Conservatives Battle to Replace Theresa May

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The race to succeed the Brexit-fouled Theresa May as Conservative party leader and the country’s prime minister got underway Saturday in earnest, two days after Britain’s governing party suffered one of its worst ever humiliations in a parliamentary by-election.

The Conservative leadership contest risks deepening the rift in the party over when, how or even if to leave the European Union — with a few of the nearly dozen contenders ruling out serving in a future cabinet — if they are vanquished and lose out to a rival.

Some Conservative lawmakers and activists fear the party is in the grips of an existential crisis and could be permanently sundered by Brexit — easily split in two. That would leave the way open for Britain’s main opposition party, Labour, to win the next general election. Some observers suspect that poll will have to be held later this year because of the long-running parliamentary deadlock over Brexit.

“The future survival of the Conservative party is at risk,” according to onetime deputy prime minister Damian Green.

On Friday, May formally quit as party leader without fanfare or ceremony, sad testimony to a ruined and brief premiership that was buffeted from the start by the challenge of pulling off Brexit. She broke all records with the number of ministers who quit her government during her less than three years at Downing Street .

She held no public events Friday and remained secluded in her constituency in southern England, with the country’s newspapers having to make do with a blurred photograph of her being driven away from Downing Street.

She left her role just as the scale of the setback the Conservatives suffered midweek in a by-election in the English market town of Peterborough sank in. Labour managed to hold the seat by a wafer-thin majority of 683 votes with a candidate who’s been accused of anti-Semitism. The Conservatives saw a 25-percent drop in voter share

The Conservatives weren’t the runners-up in a constituency they have only lost control of three times since 1880. The eight-week-old Brexit Party of Nigel Farage came second, attracting the backing of thousands of Conservative defectors. It also is raising the specter of being able to do so in other marginal constituencies up and down the country, dooming the Conservatives in a future general election.

Although Farage celebrated the result for his party, which won 29 seats in last month’s European Parliament elections, trouncing both the Conservatives and Labour, the outcome in Peterborough wasn’t entirely good news for the Brexit party either.

Peterborough voted by an overwhelming majority for Brexit in the 2016 referendum. So if Farage’s party can’t win a British parliamentary seat in Peterborough, it augers badly, according to some pollsters, for it to actually capture seats elsewhere.