Prime Minister admitted to shedding a “little tear” after husband Phillip May told her the results of the exit poll for the snap election.
Theresa May told BBC Radio 5 Live that she was “devastated” when she was told of the news, which she did not watch first hand due to her superstition about things like that”.
“It took a few minutes for it to sort of sink in, what that was telling me. My husband gave me a hug, and then I got on the phone to the Conservative party to find out what had happened,” she told Emma Barnett.
“I felt, I suppose, devastated really. I knew the campaign wasn’t going perfectly, but still the messages I was getting from 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.”
When asked if she shed a moment at this time, the Prime Minister replied: “Yes, a little tear, at that moment.”
“You’re a human being, you’ve been through that experience, but I was there as leader of the party and prime minister and had a responsibility then, as we went through the night, to determine what we were going to do the next morning.”
May called the snap election despite many promising she had no intention. Since she saw a flawed campaign where her authority diminished.
“As the campaign was going on I realised that everything wasn’t going perfectly, but throughout the whole campaign the expectation still was that the result was going to be a different one, a better one for us, than it was,” she said. “We didn’t see the result that came coming.
“If I’m honest, I’ve heard stories about quite a few Labour MPs who didn’t think they were going to keep their seats and ended up keeping those seats. So when the result came through it was a complete shock.”
Despite her minority control in Parliament, May said she does not regret calling the election.
“I don’t regret calling it, I think it was the right thing to do at the time. I’d called it because of concerns about how we were going to go forwards, particularly on Brexit.”
When asked about her informal coalition with the DUP – a controversial party who have infamously condemned gay marriage and abortion – May said: “One of the important things with that deal, was that we were very clear that the Conservative party was not going to row back at all in anything we’ve done on the equalities agenda.”