LONDON — The speaker of Britain’s House of Commons, John Bercow, who gained a degree of celebrity by repeatedly challenging Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit agenda, has said that he will remain in his post to see the country through the crisis, increasing the likelihood of a constitutional confrontation over the country’s withdrawal from the European Union.

In a speech in Washington on Tuesday, Mr. Bercow scoffed at the idea that Parliament would allow 10 Downing Street to chart the country’s course out of the bloc, calling it “for the birds.”

“The idea that Parliament is going to be evacuated from the center stage of the debate is unimaginable, is simply unimaginable,” he said. He also told the British newspaper The Guardian that he had never committed to leaving this summer, as has been widely reported.

“I do feel that now is a time in which momentous events are taking place and there are great issues to be resolved,” he said. “In those circumstances, it doesn’t seem to me sensible to vacate the chair.”

He added: “The idea that there is an inevitability for a no-deal Brexit would be a quite wrong suggestion. There is no inevitability whatsoever about that.”

Mr. Bercow’s remarks drove straight at one of the central questions about Brexit’s next stage: If a new prime minister — say, Boris Johnson, the former foreign secretary — is willing to lead the country out of the European Union without a withdrawal agreement, would Parliament be able to block it?

The question is not merely academic.

Mrs. May is set to step down as Conservative Party leader on June 7, and Mr. Johnson is considered the front-runner to succeed her. A chief backer of Brexit, he has said that if he were selected as the new Tory leader, he would ensure that Britain leaves the European Union by the end of October, with or without a withdrawal agreement.

On Wednesday, Esther McVey, another contender for the leadership post, matched Mr. Johnson’s pledge to leave on Oct. 31, declaring that the only way to fulfill the popular mandate “is to actively embrace leaving the E.U. without a deal.”

Dominic Raab, another favorite to succeed Mrs. May, suggested he could push through a no-deal Brexit over Parliament’s opposition.

“It’s very difficult for Parliament now to legislate against a no-deal, or in favor of a further extension, unless a resolute prime minister is willing to acquiesce in that — and I would not,” he told the BBC.

Parliament, making its opinion on the matter clear, has repeatedly voted to exclude the possibility of a no-deal withdrawal, which most analysts say would hammer the British economy. But such parliamentary votes are not legally binding, and constitutional scholars have spent the past few days trying to sort out which side would win a disagreement between the executive and legislative branches.

The short answer: No one knows.

Maddy Thimont Jack, an analyst at the Institute for Government, a research group based in London, said that Parliament had no clear legal means to block a prime minister intent on leaving without a deal, short of bringing down the government with a vote of no confidence.

But that doesn’t mean a prime minister would be willing to override Parliament’s will, a move that would take Britain into uncharted — and potentially perilous — political territory.

“It has always been quite a theoretical possibility that you’d have a prime minister who would be willing to throw out such basic constitutional values,” said Jack Simson Caird, a research fellow at the Bingham Center for the Rule of Law. “Theresa May was never going to do that. The question is: How far would a new prime minister be willing to pursue it?”

Mr. Caird said that Mr. Johnson might shy away from open confrontation with the House of Commons, for fear of alienating the public.

“Say you have a showdown with Parliament, you win by taking some extreme measure, where do you go from there?” Mr. Caird said. “He would face such fury from those who oppose him that he was acting like a dictator. I don’t think it’s credible for someone like him.”

In his remarks to the Brookings Institution in Washington on Tuesday, Mr. Bercow described a longstanding quest to increase Parliament’s influence with respect to the executive branch, and said his actions on Brexit were not an expression of his personal views.

“When the committed Brexiteers were in a minority under David Cameron, I stood up for their rights,” he said. “Part of the speaker’s job is to champion the rights of minorities. Now, in a sense, the Brexiteers are in the majority in the Conservative Party, but there are other views, and those other views are entitled to be heard.”

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