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.
You may also want to watch:
The Prime Minister's husband Philip broke the news and gave her a hug to console her, she told BBC's Radio 5 Live.
Most Read
- 1 The Prime Minister is out of his league
- 2 Empty shelves are partly down to Brexit - but Leavers won't admit it
- 3 Party politics will not save us from the Tories - we need drastic action
- 4 The Spanish village with the mythical blue lagoon
- 5 Rabbits defeat French army
- 6 Has something shifted in sado-populist Britain?
- 7 Would Javid have renamed ICU wards 'Drama Queen Zones'?
- 8 Ed Vaizey overtakes Paul Dacre in the Ofcom race
- 9 Priti Patel - the poster girl for our poisonous politics
- 10 Boris Johnson: The sado-populist prime minister
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.'
Become a Supporter
The New European is proud of its journalism and we hope you are proud of it too. We believe our voice is important - both in representing the pro-EU perspective and also to help rebalance the right wing extremes of much of the UK national press. If you value what we are doing, you can help us by making a contribution to the cost of our journalism.
