Mrs May will carry on – partly because she believes she is still the best leader, and partly because the rest of her party shows she is correct in that assumption.
There will be a period where both the main parties will claim ‘victory’, when clearly neither of them have it.
Hopefully, Mrs May will learn the valuable lessons from this campaign –
If you make it all about ‘you’, and the people don’t really like ‘you’, then you will fall over on polling day.
If you make the entire campaign about one thing – Brexit – which people are tired of hearing about, you will fall over on polling day.
If you make your campaign via the print press, and ignore social media, your message will fail to reach the vast majority of disenfranchised young people, and you fall over on poling day.
If you bring out a ‘social care tax’ and alienate the vast majority of your core vote, and then backtrack on it, so you look shifty and opportunist, you will fall over on polling day.
If you ignore your opponents’ offer to remove tuition fees, credible or not, you watch the entire student vote shift over to them, then you will fall over on polling day.
And finally, the first point bears repeating, because it is the crux of the result – if you misjudge your own personal appeal, and that of your trumpeted (but yet to be proved) negotiation skills, you will fall over on polling day.
I am in the wrong job, I should be a political analyst.