Theresa May shows grit in face of critics as Brexit deadline looms

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British Prime Minister Theresa May has built her career on dogged determination and an uncanny ability to bounce back from humiliation, something that has confounded her critics and left pundits wondering how long she can carry on. But Ms. May’s resilience is about to be tested like never before this week as she tries to salvage her crumbling Brexit strategy and hang on to her tenuous leadership of the Conservative Party.

Ms. May heads to Birmingham on Sunday for the party’s annual four-day conference where she’ll come face to face with her fiercest critics, including former foreign secretary Boris Johnson, who has likened her handling of Brexit to a suicide bomber. The party is bitterly divided over Brexit and up to 50 Tory MPs oppose Ms. May’s key proposal, which would essentially keep the country within the EU’s single market for trade in goods. They believe that’s a betrayal of the Brexit mandate and they have enough support in the House of Commons to block parliamentary approval for any EU deal the Prime Minister strikes. Ms. May is standing firm. She’s told her caucus and the country that her plan is the only viable option and that if it dies, the U.K. will leave the EU without any agreement, something that many business leaders fear will cause chaos. The government has been warning for weeks that leaving without a deal could ground airplanes, raise cellphone bills, strand truckers and even affect the country’s ability to track space debris.

It’s a high-risk showdown and time is running out. The U.K. leaves the EU in six months and there’s only a few weeks left to negotiate a deal to set the parameters for the future relationship. Ms. May is forcing her opponents to either back her or face the consequences of a no-deal Brexit. Whether that works “is an enormous question mark,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester. “For a woman who campaigned on strong and stable government, it would be a colossal gamble, a real turn of the roulette wheel."

Ms. May has certainly been here before. She’s spent 21 years in Parliament honing her reputation as a steadfast, if stodgy, politician who gets the job done. It’s a trait she developed in childhood in which, raised as the only child of a vicar, Ms. May spent her time in bookish pursuits and once said the naughtiest thing she ever did growing up was run through a wheat field, much to annoyance of some farmers.

Her ability to bounce back from political catastrophe is nothing short of miraculous. She somehow managed to survive calling a snap election last year that, instead of boosting the Tory majority in Parliament, as she hoped, cost the party so many seats it could only cling to power with the help of a minor party from Northern Ireland. The election disaster was followed by last year’s Tory conference when her main address to members turned into a fiasco. She was interrupted by a prankster, halted by a coughing fit and stood helplessly as a sign behind her began to fall apart. The harrowing performance led most political watchers to count the days before she would be ousted as leader. But Ms. May hung on. The day after the conference she headed home to her constituency of Maidenhead, west of London, and told reporters the country needed her “calm leadership.”

“She’s a difficult lady to read. She doesn’t say very much,” said Richard Kellaway, a town councilor in Maidenhead who also chairs the local Conservative association. “She’s quite renowned for keeping fairly laconic in her responses.” Mr. Kellaway recalled meeting Ms. May last week for a cup of tea at his home just after she’d returned from an EU leaders’ summit in Salzburg, Austria, where her Brexit plan had been summarily rejected and she’d been mocked on social media by European Council President Donald Tusk. “What was remarkable about her was she did seem to be able to focus on what we were talking about,” he said. “The things going around in her head must be amazing but she does have the ability to focus on these local things.”

Dr. Ford says her resoluteness as prime minister stems in part from her long stint as home secretary, arguably the second-toughest job in government. The department handles some of the most high-profile issues, from national policing to terrorism and immigration. Few ministers last in the job for more than a couple of years but Ms. May served for six years, the longest stretch in postwar history. “You have to develop an incredibly thick skin and determined approach to do that job for any period of time,” Dr. Ford said. “And that’s the experience she brings to [the Prime Minister’s office], that kind of siege mentality."

Ms. May won plaudits within Tory circles as home secretary for taking a tough stance on crime and securing the deportation of radical Islamic cleric Abu Qatada after years of legal battles. When David Cameron stepped down after the 2016 Brexit referendum, Ms. May was acclaimed to succeed him as Tory leader and prime minister. She was thought of as the calm, steady, leader the country needed to get through Brexit. It hasn’t worked out that way and today polls show the vast majority of voters think she’s doing a bad job on Brexit.

For now, there is no clear rival to replace her as party leader, and many of her opponents seem happy to let her stick around until March and take the flak for whatever goes wrong. But no one is counting her out just yet, including her long-time friend, London lawyer Alicia Collinson. She recommended looking to cricket, Ms. May’s favorite sport, to get a sense of her resilience. “There’s a song about cricket by [pop band] The Duckworth Lewis Method called Out in the Middle, which might offer a clue,” she said. The song is about the pressure of the game and it begins with the lines; “You can be high in society, You can be top of your family tree, But have you got what it takes to be out in the middle?”