Theresa May: She has offered to quit in an orderly manner but after the failure of the ‘indicative votes’ it seems MPs are clamouring for her to go immediately.

I honestly thought this was going to be a piece about Theresa May’s offer to quit as prime minister if her backbenchers help her get her bad Brexit deal through Parliament.

That would have been too easy.

Her offer has already been superseded, it seems, by events in the House of Commons:

It might seem counter-intuitive. Surely, if the “indicative” votes failed to produce an option that a majority of MPs can support, then the initiative passes back to Mrs May and her deal, right?

Wrong.

For a start, two of the options MPs considered gained more support than Mrs May’s Brexit deal – Margaret Beckett’s proposal of a second referendum on any proposed terms for withdrawal had 268 votes in favour – and 295 against; and Kenneth Clarke’s call for the UK to go into a customs union with the European Union had 264 votes supporting it, with 272 against.

And then there’s the fact that, even after Mrs May offered to quit as prime minister, she still couldn’t get enough Tory backbenchers to support her deal. The Parliamentary arithmetic means it would still fail to earn enough support.

Or, as I put it earlier in the day (and others took up)…

Diane Furminger contributed: “Personally I wouldn’t believe her. She’s not exactly a woman of her word.” And that’s true too, as would-be Tory rebels found out when they came back into line on a previous Brexit vote and then Mrs May reneged on the deal.

That’s probably why people like Rachael Swindon have been creating memes like this:

She has to go.

But she has made it clear that she’ll only go if Parliament passes her Brexit deal – hers and no other.

And that isn’t going to happen.

So, are we stuck with her?

Or is a new general election looking more likely?

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