May's departure and new #Brexit endgame

The Times and other local media are betting on Friday (24 May), others that she will wait until after the official release of European Parliament election results on Sunday (26 May). There may be resignations of more cabinet ministers as they leave a sinking ship and position themselves for the leadership battle ahead. For May, the personal stakes are that she will have broken a promise to deliver Brexit and so will have a devastatingly empty legacy; but the real question now is who will lead the country next and what Brexit will emerge.

Logically, the removal of the player who negotiated the only agreed deal with Brussels makes the more extreme scenarios - no-deal Brexit and no Brexit at all - more likely. If we assume that May is replaced by someone advocating a harder Brexit - say, Boris Johnson - the next step would be for that person to go to Brussels and demand a renegotiation. If, as many expect, the EU gives them short shrift, their default position would then be to wield a no-deal Brexit as a threat.

The only snag is that this parliament has ruled out a no-deal Brexit on more than one occasion - so their next move might have to be getting a brand new parliament via a general election. That opens up a whole new Pandora’s Box. In a way, the Brexit end-game is only just starting.

Feeding into the Brexit saga, as mentioned above, are the European Parliament elections starting today in the UK and the Netherlands and closing in most of the rest of the bloc on Sunday night. In Britain, polls suggest May’s Conservatives are heading for a wipe-out with Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party the main beneficiary; Labour looks set to be punished for a halfway-house position on Brexit which doesn’t seem to be going down well with either Leavers or Remainers; while the Liberal Democrats and the Greens look like being the main receptacles of the Remain vote. Take Brexit out of the equation, and the scenario is not too dissimilar in the Netherlands where ruling conservatives also risk getting beaten by an upstart far-right populist called Thierry Baudet.