Normally, for a prime minister, an electoral defeat unequalled in her party’s history would be the low point of the week. But few British premiers have led under a storm as rough as the one that has engulfed Theresa May.
After one final heave-ho on her doomed Brexit withdrawal bill early last week, May finally realised that she had no way out and, on Friday, hours after Britons had finished voting in the European elections, she surrendered to the inevitable and announced that she would be resigning as Conservative leader on 7 June. The Observer’s political editor, Toby Helm, goes behind the scenes of May’s darkest week. Then, we look at the Tories gathering in a pack to replace her, before Dan Sabbagh takes the long view of a premiership that was riddled with errors. Later, Andrew Rawnsley asks the question no Tory MPs seem to be asking: can they really do better than May?
If May hadn’t jumped, last Sunday’s results in the UK’s elections to the European parliament would likely have provided a shove. Nigel Farage’s single-issue protest Brexit party came from nowhere to a dominant first, with the Tories nowhere back in fifth with 9%.
Farage, combined with a strong performance from explicitly pro-remain parties such as the Lib Dems and Greens, helped deliver massive blows to both the Conservatives and Labour. We look at what the results mean for Brexit. Then, in a special report, Darren Loucaides reports on how the original digital master plan of Italy’s populist Five Star Movement was borrowed by Farage to help the Brexit party top the polls without the infrastructure of traditional political organisations.
Away from Britain’s insular Brexit drama, the rest of the European Union also voted in a critical contest for the future of the European parliament and for the entirety of the European project. No singular narrative held the day. There was a surge by the Greens and, in countries such as Italy, the far right. In others, centrist parties held the line – although the two biggest groupings in the parliament lost a large chunk of MEPs. Our European affairs editor Jon Henley tries to make sense of this new, fractured parliament and, in opinion, columnist Natalie Nougayrède praises Europe’s forces of moderation for holding back the wider plans of the far right.
This week we also report on Narendra Modi’s big win in the even bigger Indian elections. With a second term and an enlarged majority, what does the Hindu nationalist leader’s supremacy mean for India – and its 172 million Muslims? Michael Safi reports.
We also feature a story about the new race to get the moon (lining up on each side are various tech billionaires and Nasa – which is being pushed to return to the moon by 2024) and, in our culture pages, Elton John writes about seeing his life on the big screen in the new biopic Rocketman.
