D ESPERATE, NO-HOLDS-BARRED scrapping has become Britain’s day-to-day mode of government. On December 10th a landmark vote on Theresa May’s Brexit deal was cancelled at the last minute, ambushing ministers who were giving live-broadcast interviews confirming that it would definitely go ahead. The next day Mrs May began a tour of Europe, promising to get better terms on the deal, only to be politely rebuffed in every capital she visited. The prime minister came home to find her own Conservative Party planning a vote of no confidence in its leader. She won, but only after promising that she would step down before the next election. Even then, 117 of 317 Tory MP s voted against her.

It is a grim spectacle, but the upshot of the latest bruising episode is that Mrs May staggers away bloodied to fight another round. Under the Tory party’s rules, having seen off the attempted coup, she is immune from further internal challenges for a year. The hardline Brexit bullies in her party have been shown up for the reckless obsessives they are. But the more abiding truth for Mrs May is the scale of the rebellion, which has demonstrated that she has no realistic hope of getting her plan for Brexit through Parliament. And it is not just her plan: none of the possible Brexits commands a majority of MP s.

Mrs May needs to recognise that she and the country have only one way out of this impasse. That is to go over the heads of MP s and ask the people directly.

This week’s coup attempt was Westminster’s worst-kept secret. MP s from the European Research Group of Tory Eurosceptics had been trying to gather the 48 signatures needed to trigger a no-confidence vote in Mrs May ever since it became clear that she wants a “softer” exit from the EU than the radical separation they demand.

Her deal, which the EU has already signed off but which Parliament must still approve, would keep the entire United Kingdom in a customs union and extensive regulatory alignment until both sides had settled on a comprehensive new relationship, which might take years. During that time, Britain would be subject to European rules and unable to sign its own trade deals. Hard-Brexiteers say this compromise amounts to vassalage, but they have failed to come up with any alternative plan able to win over their colleagues in Parliament.

With the failure of their rebellion, Britain dodged a blow to the head. Had Mrs May lost, the Tories’ 124,000 party members would have chosen a new leader—and thus a new prime minister—to see Brexit through. They may well have picked the more Eurosceptic of the shortlisted candidates, increasing the chance of a bad-tempered, chaotic and ruinous no-deal exit.

It is also welcome that, in order to pick up enough votes, Mrs May had to promise to quit before the next election, due in 2022. She has proved a poor prime minister and a disastrous campaigner. Her planned departure, along with the defeat of the Brexit monomaniacs, ought to accelerate the promotion of the promising next generation of Tory MP s, to replace the duds who have served the country so ineptly.

All this means that Mrs May’s premiership now has but one purpose—and it is a monumental one: to steer a split party and a minority government through the most complex and divisive peacetime transition in modern British history.

The danger is that Mrs May, a serial postponer, will try to run down the clock to within a couple of months of Brexit day on March 29th. She might calculate that Parliament will then have little choice but to back her deal, because the alternative will be leaving with a calamitous no-deal.

Such a gun-to-the-head Brexit would guarantee rancour and unhappiness across Britain for years to come. Fortunately Mrs May is unlikely to be able to bring it about. For almost two years she put off spelling out the compromises that Brexit necessarily involves, in the hope that the extremists in her party would cool off. They didn’t. This week’s confidence vote makes it clearer than ever that waiting another month or two will not magically create a majority in favour of her agreement.

Dogged and persistent as she is, she must recognise that the parliamentary arithmetic is hopeless. Labour and other opposition parties are set against her blueprint, as are more than 100 of her own Tory MP s—Brexiteers and Remainers alike. Mrs May’s European travels this week have confirmed that she has little prospect of winning enough changes to satisfy the rebels. The deal is no more alive than it was when the government postponed the vote in a panic on Monday.

If Mrs May wants her agreement to prevail, she must call a second referendum. The block in Parliament is caused by the conflicting claims to democratic legitimacy of elected MP s and the referendum of 2016. The prime minister insists that her compromise is the only workable way to respect the will of the people, as expressed in that vote two and a half years ago. MP s, elected by those same people only last year, counter that her plan bears too little resemblance to the campaign on which the referendum was fought—either because a “real” Brexit should be harder, or because the entire prospectus has been shown up as hollow. Rather than try to square this circle with pointless political street-fighting, Parliament should accept that the only way to know what the people want is to ask them.

Many Conservative MP s are dead against a second referendum (though a lot of them voted for Mrs May in 2016 only to demand the chance to think again this week). Now that they have used up their one shot at deposing Mrs May, she can call a parliamentary vote on her deal without the risk of being brought down by her own side. Heavy defeat could still provoke a no-confidence motion by the Labour Party. But few if any Tory MP s, or those of the allied Democratic Unionist Party, want to see a Labour government, let alone one led by the far-left Jeremy Corbyn.