Theresa May survives but does not live. Her prime ministership has come to resemble an episode of Fear the Walking Dead.
Her Conservative party colleagues decided by a margin of 200 to 117 to reaffirm their “confidence” in the Prime Minister.
All the big parties in Britain have introduced rule changes to make it harder to get rid of an unwanted leader. One such rule for the Conservatives in office is to have a huge number of “payroll jobs” for MPs, in which they get extra money for alleged extra duties far below that of a minister.
Thus there is a bewildering array of Conservative MPs who are special trade envoys to every corner of the Earth and pocket some allowance for doing no effective work, because under May’s Brexit deal Britain will not be able to negotiate any new trade deals with anyone. But the consequence is to bind them like a minister to the Prime Minister. They cannot oppose her leadership without resigning their extra jobs.
A clear majority therefore of Tory MPs not on an extra government payroll voted no confidence in the PM. Given there was no declared challenger, more than a third of her party voted for an empty chair rather than May.
May had to promise she would not stay as leader and attempt to take the Conservatives to the next election scheduled in 2022.
But as the leading Brexiteer and May critic Jacob Rees-Mogg observed, her confirmation in leadership does not change the parliamentary arithmetic.
Rees-Mogg and his European Research Group allies will continue to vote against May’s deal, as will the Democratic Unionists, the Labour Party, the Scottish Nationalists, the Liberal Democrats and even many pro-EU Conservatives.
And the EU leaders reiterate that the legally binding bit, the 585-page treaty on the transition period, cannot be changed at all.
Almost everyone except May is concerned that her transition period agreement provides no mechanism for Britain to leave the transition period, which could last forever, without EU agreement.
The transition arrangement also makes it clear that even if Britain can one day negotiate a new trading relationship with the EU, Northern Ireland must always stay governed by EU regulations.
For a British government to sign up to this involves changing the constitutional status of Northern Ireland without consulting the people of Northern Ireland. So here, Groundhog day like, May is stuck in her familiar dilemma.
She claims that leaving the EU without a deal would be an economic catastrophe. And she also says that staying in the EU after all, that is repudiating the result of the 2016 referendum, would also be unacceptable.
So what can May possibly do?
She can do only what she always does: delay, delay, delay.
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