I shed a tear after exit poll shock, admits May
Theresa May shed a ‘ little tear’ when she saw the shock exit poll on election night predicting she would lose her majority.
her husband Philip broke the news and gave her a hug to console her, she said. In an interview with BBC’s radio 5 Live’s emma Barnett, she opened up about the emotional impact of the June 8 result and insisted she had never considered stepping down.
The PM said she had not watched the exit poll as ‘I am a little bit superstitious about things like that’.
‘We didn’t see the result that came coming,’ she added. ‘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.’
Mrs May said it was distressing to see party colleagues losing their seats. When asked if she was devastated enough to shed a tear, Mrs May replied: ‘Yes, a little tear ... at that moment.’
In the interview to mark her first year in No 10, the Prime Minister said she had not considered resigning, saying: ‘It can be easy sometimes if something like this happens just to walk away and leave somebody else to deal with it.’
she added: ‘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.
‘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.’
Mrs May said there should have been a more positive message during the campaign but she did not regret calling the election because it was ‘the right thing to do at the time’.
The Prime Minister said she would tell her younger self: ‘Believe in yourself, always do the right thing and work hard to tackle injustice when you see it.’
Challenged about the deal with the DUP, she repeated she was a femi-
‘Changing our country’
nist and said she had made it clear the Conservatives were not going to row back on their equality agenda.
and she said she had greater respect for Jeremy Corbyn since the election, particularly over the way he acted as a constituency MP following the Finsbury Park attack.
asked whether she would serve a full term, Mrs May said: ‘What’s driven me throughout that is a sense of duty, a sense of public service and of wanting to do the right thing and make a difference, make a change to people’s lives.
‘There is a lot that we need to do and as Prime Minister I want to get on with that job of changing people’s lives for the better and changing our country for the better. and I’m going to carry on.’
The Prime Minister also admitted she could not absolutely guarantee she would get Brexit through the Commons.
‘That’s what politics is about. What politics is about is, about putting up a proposition to people, and explaining why we think it’s the right deal.’
Yesterday andrea Leadsom, who stood against Mrs May for the Tory leadership last year, insisted the Prime Minister could lead the party into the next general election.
she told The house magazine that Mrs May would remain PM ‘for as long as she wishes to do so’.
But she failed to deny claims that dozens of Conservative MPs had urged her to stand again for the top job in the wake of the election disaster.