Theresa May Had One Job — Brexit. She Failed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/opinion/may-resigns-brexit.html

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With yet another rejection of her Brexit deal looming, along with an imminent drubbing for her Conservatives in elections to the European Parliament, no one much disagreed with Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May when she stepped outside the black door of 10 Downing Street on Friday and said that it was “in the best interests” of the country for a new prime minister to take over.

She moved to that address in July 2016 with but one task, to clean up a mess not of her making. Her predecessor, David Cameron, had quit after calling a referendum on whether to exit the European Union, leaving it to Mrs. May to find a way of getting a brutally divided nation out of an extraordinarily tangled relationship. She failed, and on Friday she paid the price.

Mrs. May, a vicar’s daughter and lifelong Conservative stalwart, is exiting with all the dignity and reserve she has maintained throughout the tortuous process. But there was no denying the scope of her failure: The deal she had painstakingly negotiated with the European Union was overwhelmingly rejected by the British Parliament, again and again, and in the end she left the country more divided over Brexit than ever. The obligatory tributes poured in, recognizing that Mrs. May deserved at the least to be credited with extraordinary stoicism through all the setbacks, backstabbing and name-calling. But politics has little time for sympathy, and attention quickly turned to what next.

Yet it is worth pausing and asking whether the sorry state of affairs over Brexit is entirely Mrs. May’s fault, or whether she was given an impossible mission. She is hardly free of blame: Mrs. May said different things at different times as she tried different tacks in the shifting political winds; she was indecisive at key junctures, and she seriously miscalculated her strength when she called a parliamentary election that lost her the small majority she had inherited.

Yet to anyone following the process from outside the caldron of British politics, the question is whether there ever was a formula that the British could have agreed on. From the outset, Brexit was based on an illusion — that Britain could abandon those aspects of the European Union it didn’t like, like free movement within the union and limitations on sovereignty, but keep the economic benefits of a trade union.

The European Union was never prepared to allow Britain an à la carte exit, if only to avoid giving ideas to other wavering members. And as frustrations grew, so did the vilification of Mrs. May. She was mocked as Theresa Maybe for her wavering, or as Maybot for her stiffness.

Maybe there was a compromise she failed to spot; maybe she was the wrong person for the job. But maybe not. Many of her sharpest critics — like Boris Johnson, for a time her foreign secretary and now the favorite to succeed her — never offered viable alternatives to the knottiest problems of leaving the union, like how to keep the border with Northern Ireland open.

None of these issues will disappear with Mrs. May’s departure. The European Union has made clear that it will not reopen negotiations, and it is hard to see how someone more dogmatic than Mrs. May can bridge the yawning divide in the Parliament and among the public.

The power struggle should be in full swing when President Trump arrives for a state visit on June 3. Mrs. May will still be prime minister; she scheduled her formal departure as Conservative Party leader for June 7, so she is likely to suffer some comments from the president, who had publicly criticized the way she was handling the Brexit negotiations and offered her advice on how to do it right.

Mrs. May offered no apology for how she tried to do it, and apportioned no blame, when she spoke on Friday. “It will be for my successor to seek a way forward that honors the result of the referendum,” she said. “To succeed, he or she will have to find consensus in Parliament where I have not. Such a consensus can only be reached if those on all sides of the debate are willing to compromise.”

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