LONDON – British Prime Minister Theresa May has stuck by her top team of ministers, forgoing what has become a traditional post-election reshuffle in a sign of her diminished authority days before Brexit talks are due to start.

May is seeking a deal with a small Northern Irish party to stay in power after she gambled away a parliamentary majority in an election she did not need to call. Conservative Party loyalists urged her to change her leadership style, while critics talked about her days being numbered.

The 60-year-old leader confirmed most of her ministers in her top team, or cabinet, an apparent reversal of earlier plans to turf out those who were considered as less than loyal, a day after accepting the resignations of her two closest aides.

“Theresa May is a dead woman walking. It’s just how long she’s going to remain on death row,” former Conservative finance minister George Osborne, who was sacked by May when she became prime minister last year, told the BBC.

The Conservatives won 318 House of Commons seats in Thursday’s election, eight short of an outright majority. Labour, the main opposition party, won 262.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said he could still be prime minister, although his party has no obvious way to build a majority coalition. He said a new election might be necessary later this year or early in 2018.

The political turmoil comes a week before Britain is due to start negotiating the terms of its exit from the European Union in talks of unprecedented complexity that are supposed to wrap up by the end of March 2019, when Britain actually leaves.

That timeline now looks even more ambitious than before, not least because May’s electoral debacle has emboldened those within her own party who object to her “hard Brexit” approach of leaving the European single market and customs union.

Reuters