https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/04/brexit-mess-theresa-may-tories
... Were I in May’s shoes, I would pre-empt a confidence vote forced by letters from 48 of my own MPs, and – in the manner of John Major in 1995 – demand one myself (if necessary by instructing sympathetic backbenchers to trigger the process). I would then set out an explicit, unambiguous and unapologetic strategy for Brexit, and instruct the Conservative parliamentary party to back me or sack me.
Let us say, as seems quite probable, that MPs sacked her, as they did Iain Duncan Smith in 2003. There would then be a period of
bedlam as the Tory party fought with teeth bared and daggers drawn to settle not only its future but the future of Britain’s relationship with the EU. It would be ugly, protracted and almost entirely destructive.
Would the answer that emerged at the end be sustainable? Would the new Conservative leader – and, if the Commons pact with the Democratic Unionist party held – prime minister be able to provide the discipline and clear sense of trajectory that has been so conspicuously lacking under May? Quite possibly not. But that is the whole point. It may well be that the Tory party, as presently constituted, is structurally incapable of meeting the patriotic needs of the hour. It really is for the Conservatives, and not the rest of us, to prove that this suspicion is unfounded.
At any rate, the present arrangement is a hideous international embarrassment. It seems to me painfully obvious that we need an extension of the negotiating period set by article 50 – entirely possible under its section 3 – if only to replace panic with some semblance of deliberation. And,
sooner rather than later, there should be another general election...
... Note that the Tory party infighting process would be almost entirely undemocratic, would reflect little of the 'will of the people' nor their interests, and only in the furthest reaches of the imagination could be called 'patriotic'. - GD
= new reply since forum marked as read