Finally, the Demise of Zombie May

Wonderful news to begin the holiday weekend: Two Fridays from now, June 7, Theresa May will resign her role as leader of the Conservative Party. The following week the process to select her replacement will begin formally, with her successor in place before parliament's recess at the end of July.

In all the sententious write-ups of May's departure there's precious little about what actually triggered it. A pre-resignation story from yesterday by Benjamin Mueller (see "Britons Pause to Vote in an Election Many Did Not Want") leads one to believe that Tory backbenchers had marshaled the votes to rewrite the 1922 Committee rules, paving the way to topple the zombie prime minister with a new no-confidence vote:

But Mrs. May’s undoing seemed more a matter of timing and choreography than anything else. She will meet on Friday with Graham Brady, who leads the committee of Mrs. May’s Conservative backbench lawmakers. He is holding onto secret ballots from some of those lawmakers that could allow the party to change its rules and try to unseat Mrs. May almost immediately.

The event that put some pep in the 1922 Committee step is yesterday's election to the European Parliament. The Tories are predicted to be headed for another catastrophic rout; this coming on the heels of the disastrous local elections of May 2. Apparently the foul odor of the zombie prime minister finally proved to be too much.

In fact, the zombie May is a perfect personification of the reigning, tottering neoliberal world order. Caught between rising demands for a return to social democracy on one side and an establishment drift to neo-fascism and ultra-nationalism on the other, mainstream leadership chooses to fudge, dither and run out the clock, hoping that the dialectic of history somehow reverses course. That's why Theresa May's predicament has been worthy of attention, particularly since her shockingly poor showing in the June 2017 general election: how long can leadership deny the obvious? In May's case, the answer is two years. Her minority government was a joke to begin with.

Boris Johnson will be no improvement, assuming he will be the new prime minister. Nothing will have changed, other than support for crash-out will have gained momentum. So we're right back to crash-out or a snap general election. Since all Brexit decisions are guided by the Tory avoidance of a general election, odds at this point are on a crash-out.