British Prime Minister Theresa May | Jack Taylor/Getty Images EU patience with Theresa May wears thin Officials in Brussels say they now regard the UK prime minister as an unreliable negotiating partner.

It may not be the perception in London, but EU leaders feel they've bent over backward to help the U.K. prime minister deliver an orderly Brexit.

They won't be doing that anymore.

Theresa May’s failure to get the Brexit deal through parliament — and her continued failure to build a national consensus around a plan for the U.K.’s future — has led her EU colleagues to conclude they can no longer rely on her.

The idea that the likes of Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Donald Tusk have been great allies of the U.K. prime minister may sound preposterous in London — even to May herself. But whatever assistance they offered May to guard against a Brexit ideologue taking her place appears now to be drying up.

In recent days, European Council President Donald Tusk and the bloc’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, have publicly praised a plan put forward by May’s opposite number, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, that would keep Britain inside the EU’s customs union.

Those remarks, by Tusk directly to May in a face-to-face meeting last week, and by Barnier at a news conference on Monday in Luxembourg (he dubbed Corbyn's intervention “interesting in tone and in content"), showed the EU is no longer willing to defer to May’s handling of Brexit. It underscored how frustration with her has grown so deep in Brussels that EU officials no longer see a big risk in wading directly into the U.K.’s volatile domestic political debate.

EU negotiators have moved with uncharacteristic speed to publicly torpedo British ideas they regard as false or magical thinking.

The European Parliament's Brexit coordinator Guy Verhofstadt was the most explicit in endorsing cross-party dialogue in Westminster. "I hope that such cross-party cooperation will now lead to a new proposal, further proposals by the British sides," he said in Strasbourg Tuesday, while denouncing "irresponsible" hard-liners for trying to prevent such cooperation.

"In my opinion, it would surprise me that a country that has shown so much political creativity in its long history would not be able to overcome these differences," he added.

Rapid rebuttal

In addition to the praise for Corbyn’s customs union idea — which May poured cold water on in a letter to the Labour leader on Sunday — EU negotiators have moved with uncharacteristic speed and force to publicly torpedo ideas on the British side that they regard as either false or representing magical thinking.

The EU’s deputy negotiator, Sabine Weyand, has used Twitter to debunk assertions by pro-Brexit U.K. officials or to clarify facts as Brussels sees them. "Can technology solve the Irish border problem?" she asked when May embarked on her attempt to renegotiate the Northern Ireland backstop even before she had officially put the idea to EU officials in Brussels. "Short answer: not in the next few years," was Weyand's conclusion.

The EU has long signaled that it would prefer a “softer” Brexit of the type that is inherent in Corbyn’s proposal. But they are wary of him too. “He's dealing with a party as divided as the Tories,” a senior diplomat complained. “He's another one who seems more interested in his party than in Brexit,” said another diplomat.

Rather than boosting the Labour leader as a potential occupant of No.10 Downing Street, EU officials seem intent on encouraging a consensus to emerge in Britain. That could be a cross-party majority for Corbyn’s customs union plan (something that U.K. officials point out the House of Commons has already rejected) or a Tory majority for May’s original proposal spurred on by anger at Brussels for courting Labour.

Whatever the true goal, an EU official said Brussels is experiencing "Brexit fatigue” and that support for May has reached a new low.

EU leaders are still eager to avoid a no-deal outcome though, and are intent on showing May the deference due her office — evidenced by the willingness of Tusk and Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to meet her face-to-face in Brussels last week.

In doing so, they went against objections from Dublin, which had questioned the point of the exercise with May offering nothing new, according to a diplomat briefed on the back and forth.

Nonetheless, EU leaders' loss of faith in May is a sharp reversal from the days when they viewed her as a pragmatic Remainer who, with Tory Brexiteers circling, was their best chance for a reasonable Brexit deal.

“Many times we have asked her to reach out to the opposition but every time she put her party first and her country second" — EU27 diplomat

Back in December 2017, she even received a round of applause from her fellow leaders at the European Council summit after she successfully cleared the hurdle of the first phase of Brexit talks.

The applause has long since faded and the relationship started to unravel significantly in September when frustrations with her broke into the open at informal leaders’ summit in Salzburg, Austria.

After a carefully coordinated run-up to the summit where EU capitals had avoided complicating May's position at her party's annual conference, leaders were irritated by what they saw as her combative tone in an op-ed for German newspaper Die Welt in which she denounced "unacceptable" demands from the EU.

That drew an uncompromising response at the summit from Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron as well as Tusk, prompting headlines in the U.K. press that May had been "humiliated."

Turning point

The relationship recovered sufficiently in October and November to produce the Withdrawal Agreement itself, but May's decision to postpone the ratification vote in the House of Commons on December 11 prompted dismay in Brussels and beyond.

Apart from the five-week delay it introduced, leaders and their diplomats were irritated because London had insisted on calling a special European Council summit on a Sunday in November. Downing Street wanted the media hit of rapid approval for the deal by EU leaders ahead of the December vote that, in the end, never happened.

Consequently, leaders found themselves dealing with Brexit at the scheduled December summit that was supposed to be devoted to other pressing issues.

“The December summit was a turning point,” said an EU27 diplomat. May was unable to say what was required to secure her parliament's backing. She evidently needed and wanted leaders to renegotiate the deal but could not or would not say so.

In the room, Macron and the other leaders expressed their disappointment, while Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte tried to act as mediator, an EU official said. "Often she was so confused that many leaders got even more upset,” the senior diplomat said.

Other comments by May have caused offense at key times in the process. “When I heard her saying that Europeans jump the queues or that her problem is that Westminster doesn't trust the EU, I was left wondering where is the difference with what [former Foreign Secretary and prominent Brexiteer] Boris Johnson would have said,” said a senior diplomat of a speech May delivered on immigration in November.

And EU officials watched as May moved after the rejection by parliament to tear up the backstop plan her own negotiators had proposed in the fall as an alternative to Brussels' version.

They have grown increasingly exasperated at May’s refusal to reach across party lines, and build the consensus needed not just to ratify the Withdrawal Agreement but also to negotiate the future trade relationship — something that will likely prove even harder and more controversial.

“Many times we have asked her to reach out to the opposition but every time she put her party first and her country second,” said another EU27 diplomat.

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