Story highlights Kate Maltby: Theresa May's snap general election has completely curtailed her power

The era of political certainty is over, Maltby says

Kate Maltby is a regular broadcaster and columnist in the United Kingdom on issues of culture and politics and is a theater critic for The Times of London. She is also completing a PhD in renaissance literature, having been awarded a collaborative doctoral between Yale University and University College London. The opinions expressed in this commentary are hers.

(CNN) Icarus, with his wax wings, flew too close to the sun and fell to Earth. Here in modern Britain, Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May in April chose to call a snap general election -- our political rules would have allowed her to wait for another three years -- because polls showed her 24% ahead of her Labour rival, Jeremy Corbyn, and she expected to score a crushing victory. Now she has lost her majority in Parliament.

At time of writing, May is struggling to form a coalition with the support of 10 hard-line representatives of Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party. If she quits in the next few months, she'll go down in history as the shortest-term prime minister since 1922. It's always the cockiness that kills you.

Kate Maltby

Theresa May insists that she can remain Prime Minister, but her power is crippled. Late tonight, still acting as Prime Minister, she announced that she would not be reshuffling her top team, despite briefing for weeks that she would move to sack powerful party rivals when -- not if -- she won the electorate's endorsement of her personal leadership.

How she thinks she can continue to assert any political authority is beyond most of us here in the UK.

Is this another example of the populism we've seen sweep the globe? In part, yes. Labour's Jeremy Corbyn may have his roots on the Marxist left, but his core followers have plenty in common with those of Donald Trump: a loathing of the establishment, expressed both as deep resentment of those who've benefited from globalization and as vicious abuse of the professional media.