Breaking: British PM, Theresa May wins confidence vote to remain UK Prime Minister

British Prime Minister Theresa May will retain her job at least till next year, after she won a confidence vote triggered by 48 Conservative rebel MPs, who hate the Brexit deal she worked out with EU in November.

She won 200-117. After two hours of voting in Committee Room 14 in the House of Commons, Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers, said 200 Conservative lawmakers had voted in support of May as leader, and 117 against.

Before the vote, May told her MPs  she expects to step down before the next scheduled election in 2022.

“It is not her intention to lead the party in the 2022 general election,” Solicitor General Robert Buckland told the BBC after the meeting. Quite rightly she is focusing on the here and now and the need for Brexit to be delivered.”

MPs and ministers had rallied round May since the confidence vote was announced on Wednesday morning, sending the pound rising amid expectations she would win. In a defiant statement earlier outside her Downing Street office, the prime minister said she was “ready to finish the job” by taking Britain out of the European Union next March.

She warned that ousting her now, sparking a weeks-long leadership contest, would “create uncertainty when we can least afford it”. May also warned that finding a successor who would automatically become prime minister “would mean either delaying or stopping Brexit”.

Victory would make the prime minister immune from a further Conservative challenge for a year under parliamentary rules, but would not resolve her central problem how to get divided MPs to agree to her Brexit deal. She was forced to postpone this week’s vote in the House of Commons on the text after admitting she faced a huge defeat, as her own MPs joined with opposition parties to reject it.

Responding to Wednesday’s vote, May once again fell back on trusted phrases, saying she was determined to “get on with the job”.

May, 62, described herself in a 2012 interview as a “goody two shoes” whose Protestant faith defined her upbringing.

She knew she wanted to become a politician when she was just 12, and once said the naughtiest thing she had done was running through a field of wheat.

May studied geography at the University of Oxford, where she met her husband Philip, a banker, after reportedly being introduced by future Pakistan premier Benazir Bhutto.

The couple never had children and May devoted herself to a life of public service that saw her become Conservative Party chairwoman in 2002.

She made her first splash by telling Tories at an annual conference to stop being “the nasty party” if they wanted to win.

But as interior minister she drew criticism over a clampdown on illegal migration, which caused a major scandal this year over the attempted deportation of Britons from the Caribbean.

The apparent ease with which May positioned herself to become prime minister after the referendum drew praise for her political skills — but this evaporated the following year.

Faced with an apparently unassailable poll lead, she called a snap election in June 2017 to bolster her position and Brexit plan — only to lose the Conservatives’ majority in the Commons.

Since then, May has struggled to contain the various factions of her party, and her Northern Irish allies, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), on who she relies to govern.

The DUP, like the Brexit hardliners, strongly oppose her deal, meaning that any respite afforded by Wednesday’s vote will only be temporary.

- DYB