Great Britain. Parliament - Betting the house: the inside story of the 2017 election

A t 4.30 a.m. on election night, Theresa May arrived back at Conservative headquarters with the country in chaos. Ministers were losing their seats. Labour was running rampant. The pound was in freefall.

She hurried past the party workers slumped in chairs in the campaign war room and into a small private office to consult her aides. Gone was her dream of reshaping Britain at the head of a landslide-winning Conservative government. In its place, one desperate thought remained: stop Labour.

We have got to make sure Jeremy Corbyn is not the Prime Minister, an emotional May blurted to her stunned team. Some around May believed she might quit, devastated by her failed campaign. But the desire to prevent a hardline socialist taking over Downing Street was motivation enough. I must stay, she said.

In the space of six and a half hours, Mays political mission had been transformed; her credibility and authority shredded, her chances of surviving the next twenty-four hours slim. Even if she did make it through to the weekend, May looked likely to be gone soon after.

As for Corbyn, when the exit poll was announced on TV at 10 p.m., he was serving vegetarian tortillas to friends at his home in Islington. They were swapping bets on Labours likely share of the vote, an election party game. These were not the actions of a man who expected to have to contemplate walking into No. 10 a few hours later.

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For the third time in three years, after David Camerons majority in 2015 and the EU referendum of 2016, a national vote shocked Britain. Instead of the landslide they were hoping for and expecting, the Conservatives lost their majority altogether. May finished with just 318 seats, while Corbyns Labour Party defied the commentators and most of the pollsters to win thirty more seats than he had before, finishing with 262. The implications of the hung parliament were profound. May was forced to agree 1 billion to Northern Ireland to secure the support of the Democratic Unionist Party in a confidence and supply alliance.

Furious Tory MPs demanded the heads of Mays two powerful chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. They were gone within hours. The Liberal Democrats Tim Farron and UKIPs Paul Nuttall also quit as leaders of their parties in the aftermath of the election. Tory leadership rivals including David Davis and Boris Johnson were rumoured to be on manoeuvres. As for May, she survived the summer and has claimed she wants to lead the Tories into the next election in 2022. After the disaster of 2017, few of her colleagues believe she will be given the chance.

Aside from the individual casualties, the political impact of the snap election was huge. May called the vote to strengthen her hand ahead of Brexit negotiations. She sought a mandate for her vision of a so-called hard Brexit but her party lost the mandate to do anything in government alone. Labour stood on an ambiguous but softer Brexit platform, promising to put jobs first and talking up the single market, and won support. Since the election, Labours backing for the EU single market and customs union has grown, and the Prime Minister has accepted that Britain will maintain a status quo transition period lasting two years. What Brexit will really mean is less clear than before.

Mays programme of social and economic reforms from reintroducing grammar schools to overhauling social care was also left in turmoil. Getting anything controversial through a hung parliament is a major undertaking, involving knife-edge votes late at night, backroom deals between party whips and rebel MPs, and concessions to awkward peers in the House of Lords. In the words of a senior Whitehall mandarin, its a mess.

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This book is an attempt to understand what led Theresa May to gamble her career and the countrys future on a snap election in the spring of 2017 and why her bet backfired. How did the Conservative campaign go so badly awry given the crop of hugely experienced election consultants and political strategists who were working in the partys war room? How could a Tory machine that won a higher share of the vote than even Margaret Thatcher still lose its majority? What were the forces driving the unexpected and largely unnoticed groundswell of support for Jeremy Corbyn and his radical Labour platform? Why did none of the political parties truly see what was happening? What influence did the character of the leaders have on their campaigns? Did the surprise nature of the election change the contest? And how did two terrorist attacks affect the result?

In order to answer some of these questions, this book relies on the evidence from more than 100 interviews, emails, text messages, memos, private polling reports, target seat data lists and other material from original sources. The authors have heard from individuals involved at all levels in the campaign, from the very top of politics to party workers out canvassing on the streets during the election. Most of the sources still work in politics and have requested to speak anonymously in order to give their candid opinions and recollections. In the book, the term private interview is used to attribute quotations and information derived from formal but anonymised interviews with sources. References listed as private information relate to other material for which the confidential sources cannot be given. Reconstructions of conversations are based on accounts directly from the participants themselves, or from eye-witnesses. A number of the most senior figures involved have agreed to speak and their words are reflected in named interviews throughout the book.