Blubbing PM shed a ‘tear’ after squandering majority with catastrophic campaign

PA Wire/PA Images - Credit: PA Wire/PA Images

It has been a very tough few months for the UK with terrorist atrocities and the horror of the Grenfell Tower.

So it is perhaps not surprising that Theresa May has admitted to shedding a tear … although it was the loss of her majority that got the PM blubbing.

May said she shed a ‘little tear’ when she saw the shock exit poll on election night predicting she had made a catastrophic error.

The Prime Minister’s husband Philip broke the news and gave her a hug to console her, she told BBC’s Radio 5 Live.

She admitted she was ‘devastated’ by the outcome of the June 8 vote and admitted it had come as a ‘complete shock’.

May has found her authority diminished since the disastrous general election she called to get a mandate for Brexit.

In an interview to mark her first year in No 10, the PM said she had not watched the exit poll as ‘I have a little bit of superstition about things like that’.

‘We didn’t see the result that came coming,’ she said. ‘When the result came through, it was a complete shock.

‘It took a few minutes for it to sort of sink in, what that was telling me. My husband gave me a hug.’

May said it was ‘distressing’ to see good colleagues losing their seats. Admitting she knew the campaign ‘wasn’t going perfectly’, the PM said she had still expected a ‘better’ result.

When asked if she was devastated enough to shed a tear, May replied: ‘Yes, a little tear … at that moment.’

May also opened up about the emotional impact of the result, but insisted she had never considered stepping down.

‘I felt, I suppose, devastated really because, as I say, I knew the campaign wasn’t going perfectly but, still, the messages I was getting, people I was speaking to, but also the comments we were getting back from a lot of people that were being passed on to me were that we were going to get a better result than we did,’ she said.

‘You have a responsibility. You are a human being, you have been through that experience, I was there as leader of the party and Prime Minister and I had a responsibility then to, as we went through the night, to determine what we were going to do the next morning.

‘No, I didn’t consider stepping down because I felt there was a responsibility there to ensure that the country still had a government.’