12/14/18

While the vote ends a feverish day of speculation in the capital, the prime minister still faces many challenges. NPR's London correspondent Frank Langfitt is here to explain it all. Hey there, Frank.

Hey, Audie. So let's just start with the vote itself. Give us a sense of what it all means.

Well, you know, the good news is she survived. She got 200 votes. And more good news, Audie - this is very important - is under the Conservative Party's rules,

since she survived this one, she can't be challenged again for a year, so she has some breathing space. The bad news is 117 members of her own party in Parliament have no confidence in her, and that has to sting.

And keep in mind, mathematically, she doesn't even have a majority in Parliament here. She relies on another party, the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, to help pass bills.

And you've got to wonder going forward how much support on legislation can she really expect and rely on members of her own party after a vote like this? Right. There's a difference between surviving and winning, so to speak, right? Exactly.

How much power does she have going forward? Well, you know, less than she did last week, and she didn't have a lot of power last week.

In order to secure the votes, just as you were pointing out earlier, she kind of had to tell people, OK, I'm not going to run again in the next election.

Now everybody - honestly, everybody assumed this, frankly, because she had run an election back in 2017 that went very badly.

And there's sort of an expectation that after Brexit, the party's going to want a clean slate. But by making this so clear this evening, she's basically saying, I'm not the future of the party.