May won. And she won convincingly. The Brexiteers were beaten. Two thirds of the parliamentary Tory party backed May. Had the same margin been required before effecting major constitutional change in the referendum in 2016, which should have been the case, the whole Brexit project would have failed. The hard Brexiteers are busy running around telling everybody May is damaged and should go. In normal times perhaps. But these are not normal times and as we have seen over and over, normal political rules and conventions do not apply for now.
Moreover the Tory party is, and has been for years, two parties masquerading as one. One bit is divisive, right wing nationalist and nasty. The other is one nation, international, pluralist and compassionate. The right care about themselves and their blinkered ideology. The other, the biggest part by far, cares about people, their lives and their well being. May leads that part and for the task in hand she is made the stronger by the contest.
For the glaring truth is now there for all to see. Those Brexiteers are noisy, arrogant and assertive. They are troublemakers, big on fantasy and short on reality. They have no plan other than to wreck the plans of others. But for them the stark fact now glares blindingly before them. They are a failed minority and they can never win.
As for May, her strength lies in her weakness. Having declared she will not lead the party into the next election, she has taken full ownership of delivering a Brexit based on sanity and the national interest. All right thinking people will hope she can succeed. But because Brexit is the greatest folly in all of Britain’s peacetime history, which will inflict damage beyond anything its long procession of enemies ever got near, whoever owns Brexit will be politically destroyed. May knows that. But she has put duty above her political survival. That is how history will remember her, long after the baying rabble at her heals are forgotten.