Prime Minister Theresa May committed to resigning if her Brexit deal passed Parliament. Michael Gove, secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, is the odds-on favorite to take her place.
Britain’s embattled prime minister Theresa May told her Conservative Party Members of Parliament on Wednesday that she would step down if they passed her unpopular and twice-rejected Brexit deal, a desperate final bid to win support from dissenting colleagues as her options run out.
May’s waning support among her own supporters in Parliament sealed her fate some months ago, with Tory MPs publicly urging her to resign, and several ministers quitting in protest over her handling of the Brexit process. Gove, a Brexiteer with the official Vote Leave campaign, is May’s secretary of state for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He is an experienced Cabinet minister having previously held the titles of justice secretary and education secretary.
Despite his own views on Brexit, Gove has stayed surprisingly loyal to May throughout the turbulence of her government, perhaps heeding the warning of former Conservative Party Chancellor Michael Heseltine, who served in the Thatcher government:"He who wields the knife never wears the crown." A 2014 profile of Gove in the Financial Times said that Cameron would not give him the foreign affairs brief “lest he provoked a war or pulled Britain out of the EU.”
In this context, and with an election looking all but certain within the coming year, Conservatives, having been in power since 2010, may think twice about choosing Gove as their next leader, perceiving him as too much of an electoral risk. Johnson, MP for Uxbridge, has long desired the prime minister job, and after May promised to resign, perhaps sensing that his time may have finally come, switched to backing her deal after months of eviscerating it. He resigned as May's foreign secretary over Brexit last July.
For Matthew Mokhefi-Ashton, a senior lecturer in politics at the U.K.'s Nottingham Trent University, Gove is unlikely to triumph in any contest, despite what the punters think.
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