British politics goes over a cliff

British politics is broken. It may not be fixable in time to solve the Brexit mess.

The U.K. wakes up Wednesday with a government unable to govern — in office, but without the numbers to fulfill its central purpose: a negotiated exit from the European Union.

A defeat of previously unimaginable proportions Tuesday — 432 to 202 — has left the country adrift, floating towards no deal, with no party or faction in parliament able to command a majority for any way of moving off the course it has set for itself. The only thing MPs can agree strongly on is a desire to avoid an economically damaging no deal, but they currently can’t settle on a mechanism for how to do so.

Faced with disaster, Theresa May has a plan but no strategy — the Churchillian maxim, “Keep Buggering On.”

“KBO prime minister, KBO,” one loyal government minister urged her Tuesday in the House of Commons in the run up to the vote she knew she was going to lose. May smiled and nodded in agreement. Right now, it is all she’s got.

May’s aides are clear: She is not giving up on her deal, despite the scale of the defeat. And she’s not quitting.

The game is now an even more intense fight for survival from one day to the next in the hope that something — anything — changes, but with little hope that it will.

Britain is now entering a period of rolling, daily crises with no obvious way out, its political class unable — or unwilling — to reach a compromise way to leave the European Union.