May pressed to detail resignation timetable

Prime Minister Theresa May is under increasing pressure to announce when she will resign, after being asked to attend a meeting of lawmakers from her Conservative party this week. May has been asked to attend a gathering of the party’s rank-and-file 1922 Committee — which organises votes for party leader — on Wednesday.
The chairman of the committee, Graham Brady, told the BBC yesterday that he expected to have a “clear understanding” of the timetable for her resignation during that meeting.
May’s leadership took a serious blow after the summer 2017 elections, when the Conservatives lost their majority in parliament.
Since then, her failure to get lawmakers to approve her plan for Britain to leave the European Union has reduced her standing even further, while her party took a battering in local elections earlier this month.
In March, May told her Conservative lawmakers that she would resign if her Brexit deal is approved by parliament.
Meanwhile, the former United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) head and now the leader of the recently formed Brexit Party, Nigel Farage, blasted May’s Brexit deal as “a surrender document of a nation that has been defeated in war,” Britain’s Press Association (PA) reported.
“(Brexit) hasn’t happened partly because of the dishonest, duplicitous and utterly useless prime minister in Theresa May,” Farage told supporters yesterday at a European election rally in Houghton-le-Spring in northern England, according to PA. “No question, she is the worst prime minister in the history of this country, bar none,” he said.
Farage formed the Brexit Party to protest the fact that Britain did not leave the European Union as originally planned in March.
May has so far failed to get her Brexit deal through parliament.
Meanwhile, the Conservative Party has fallen into fourth place in a poll on voting intentions for the European elections, well behind Farage’s Brexit Party which has more support than Britain’s traditionally two biggest parties combined.
According to the latest Opinium poll yesterday for the Observer newspaper, Farage’s newly formed party is on 34% of the vote ahead of the May 23 election that is being held because Britain failed to leave the European Union as expected in March.
The poll put Labour in second place on 21% while the prime minister’s Conservatives are back in fourth on 11%.
The pro-EU Liberal Democrats, the most popular party to explicitly call for a second referendum to reverse Brexit, are on 12%. Britain is now due to leave the bloc in October but with parliament split over the terms, it remains unclear how or whether it will.