LONDON

alfway through Britain’s seven-week snap election campaign, some in Theresa May’s team came to the conclusion that they had a problem — the candidate.

At a gathering of senior staff in Conservative campaign headquarters in central London, one of May's top operatives told the sitting prime minister that she risked crashing and burning like Sarah Palin did in 2008. Palin had made a blistering start after being picked as John McCain's running mate in the U.S. only to falter because she did not know how to sustain a national effort. To the operative, May was overly controlling and her inexperience would tell during a short, intense campaign.

May listened with good grace, according to a person who witnessed that encounter and relayed it not long afterward. May changed nothing. The British prime minister then still looked to be headed for a landslide, 20 points ahead in the polls. Though she had never run a national campaign before, she didn't delegate like David Cameron had done so effectively in 2015.

“The main difference is her," one senior campaign official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a week before election day, comparing May's campaign to Cameron's two years before. "She’s not as good a candidate. This is a first-time candidate who has never run for anything before other than her own constituency. No one could’ve been ready at such short notice, but you’re especially not ready if you’ve never run before.”

The result was plain to see by late Thursday. Despite record leads in the polls, a divided and seemingly weak opposition, public support for her hallmark policy of exiting the EU and one of the most experienced campaign teams ever assembled in Britain, May squandered the Conservative Party's hard-fought majority.

The Tories won 318 seats, 13 fewer than they started the campaign with and short of the 326 needed to command an outright majority in the House of Commons. Although May managed, in the immediate aftermath of the vote, to cling onto power with support from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, who won 10 seats, it was a disaster for her and her party — far closer to the "coalition of chaos" she warned would take over under Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn than the “strong and stable” leadership she promised throughout the campaign.

Labour, with 262 seats, saw its share of the national vote rise to 41 percent, a proportion last delivered by Tony Blair in 2001. It was a personal triumph for Corbyn, securing his own future as Labour leader and resurrecting the party's chances of seizing power at the next election.

In those short seven weeks, the Conservative Party and its candidate made multiple mistakes — from a botched rollout of their party platform to its decision to focus on unwinnable seats and overlook marginal constituencies they assumed, wrongly, were well in hand. Toward the end, they denied the scale of the Labour surge. This failure of political intelligence and polling was compounded by an insistence on putting a candidate who was ill at ease on the trail and with the media front and center throughout the campaign.

In the aftermath, the public blame fell on the candidate herself and her closest aides, the co-Chiefs of Staff Fiona Hill and Nick Timothy, who were both out of their jobs by Saturday, amid anger among Tory MPs over the outcome. But the story is bigger than the three of them.

The following account is based on interviews, conducted throughout the past two months, with more than a dozen people who worked closely on the Conservative campaign and spoke to POLITICO mostly on the condition of anonymity.

CENTRAL PLANNING

hile the decision to call a snap election three years before the end of the government's term came as a surprise to almost everyone in Westminster, May’s co-chief of staff Timothy had pushed for a vote for some time, according to one senior Tory aide close to him. Timothy, a long-standing May ally who was dropped from the party’s list of official candidates by Cameron’s team in 2014, wanted to establish May’s own mandate and led the process of putting together the party's electoral manifesto.

"He didn't want to be in government, only to find himself delivering David Cameron's manifesto" from 2015, the senior aide said. He has wanted to deliver the 2017 manifesto all his life, the aide added.

For a week after the election was called, John Godfrey, May’s director of policy, worked with Conservative ministers on what they wanted from the manifesto. But then Timothy stepped in and made clear he was in charge, pulling it together alongside Godfrey and the Cabinet Minister Ben Gummer, according to an MP close to May who said the prime minister left it to Timothy to get on with it.

“It was [Timothy’s] manifesto and he wanted to make it clear he was the philosopher,” said a senior Tory familiar with the process.

The team set up base on the fourth floor of Conservative campaign headquarters, where “unless you had a reason to go or had been invited to the fourth floor, you didn’t go up,” a CCHQ staffer said.

May and Timothy wanted their own manifesto for government, but the main reason for the election was Brexit. May was convinced that she needed her own mandate to push through Britain's exit from the bloc, leaving the single market and the customs union, in the face of internal opposition from Tory Remainers, a senior Tory aide close to May said.

The manifesto flopped. Its centerpiece, briefed out to newspapers the day before the launch, was quickly dubbed the “dementia tax.”

It was a policy designed to plug the social care funding black hole by making people pay for care from assets over £100,000 cashed in after they die — a form of inheritance tax on middle class families. In a blog post for Conservative Home following his resignation on Friday, Timothy insisted the policy had been carefully thought through with active input from Whitehall, but it proved a disaster with the public. According to those familiar with how the policy was drawn up, May had little to do with it, delegating to Timothy.

As the policy snowballed into a major crisis, the prime minister faced a difficult choice: tough it out and risk it dominating the rest of the campaign, or flip flop, jeopardizing her entire pitch to the nation as a strong and stable leader. In the end she went for the U-turn, promising to cap the cost of care anyone would have to pay for but refusing to acknowledge that the policy had changed.

It was a blow to a prime minister who until then had been untouchable. Under pressure, she seemed to crumble. What would European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker make of that, Labour MPs asked. She had gone from strong and stable to weak and wobbly in a week.

Craig Oliver, David Cameron's director of communication, said it was a basic error of judgment to land the policy on people without careful groundwork. Unless people are gradually introduced to a big idea, the reaction tends to be "very, very strong,” he said. "I think there is definitely a sense that if you haven’t rolled the pitch and actually led people to a certain position then it becomes very hard.”

Testing policies with focus groups was an important part of the Cameron administration's strategy, according to another senior member of the former prime minister's team, who spoke on condition of anonymity. One held in Preston before the last election revealed that "you don't touch houses," with members of the group saying, unprompted, that they wanted to pass on their home to their children.

The manifesto turned the tide of the campaign, according to figures on the inside of the campaign who watched with horror as their internal poll lead numbers collapsed almost overnight. The effect was “dra-ma-tic,” an aide familiar with the Tory campaign's internal numbers said on Friday. The Tories went from being 12 points ahead to just 2 points, according to internal phone polling carried out immediately after the manifesto was launched.

Labour felt the benefit. Older voters began shifting to the party as result, according to a senior Labour campaign official, bolstering the ranks of young people who were already convinced by Corbyn. “The Tories launched an all-out assault on their core voters,” the Labour official said. “The momentum was with us from that point.”

A week earlier, Labour's manifesto was leaked, prompting extensive coverage of Corbyn's populist platform of giveaways all funded with big tax rises on the rich and big business. Unlike in 2015 when even the slightest hint of extra borrowing invited screaming headlines about the deficit, this time round the proposal for extra spending barely received a mention. The public had grown tired of austerity and Corbyn was still nowhere near No. 10.

Senior Tory campaign strategists said that in hindsight their early lead in the polls was always vulnerable. The manifesto gave lifelong Labour voters flirting with May a reason not to switch their vote.

“One thing threw her off,” said one senior Tory campaign operative who has seen the numbers. “She had consolidated the Corbyn base, but the 'dementia tax' told them she was a typical Tory.”

A senior Tory MP involved in the campaign said shortly after polling day that the decision to include a free vote on fox hunting in the manifesto had also “contributed to a re-toxification” of the Conservatives. He said the policy had given a lot of encouragement to a “quite radicalized youth vote.” Turnout among voters aged 18-24 surged on Thursday, to 69 percent from 43 percent in 2015.

"[Labour] were circulating memes claiming Tories love ripping foxes to bits and it is very powerful. Particularly social media. You can’t give people that kind of ammunition,” he added.

Inside the Tory campaign bunker, the mood was dampened but quietly resolved. “The mood wasn’t great,” said one observer in CCHQ two days before the vote. “But I never once detected panic. It was just a case of getting on with what was in front of us every day.”

Relations among the core team remained good.

At one point in the midst of the manifesto shambles, Timothy approached Hill and ruffled her hair in jest from behind, moving to the other side of where she turned her head. The pair laughed. “There is a genuine intimacy there,” an observer said. “They are just really good friends. It’s obvious from the way they behave.”

But the way the manifesto was put together, and the overall day-to-day management of the campaign, hit on a perennial sore point among those outside the inner circle of three: May's insistence on control and reliance on her two chiefs, Hill and Timothy. “This is her campaign," said a senior campaign official a week before election day, referring to May. "Everything has to run by her. When you have three in the room and that’s it, that’s good for government, but not for campaigning."

'ALL SO INEPT'

he campaign had begun so well.

On Tuesday April 18, May stunned Westminster with the announcement of a snap general election.

Speaking in front of No. 10 Downing Street, the 60-year-old prime minister who had dreamed of that job since her childhood set out the Conservative’s message — stuck to doggedly for the following seven weeks — presenting the election as a choice between “strong and stable” leadership from her or “weak and unstable coalition government, led by Jeremy Corbyn.”

The speech electrified Westminster. May was off to a flyer.

The first poll pointed to a comfortable Tory win. ICM’s snap survey had the Conservatives on 46 percent, 21 points ahead of Labour on 25 percent.

Around her core of Hill and Timothy, May assembled a team with a proven track record. Marshaled by experienced Tory insider Stephen Gilbert, the prime minister also brought back Jim Messina, the U.S. data expert, Lynton Crosby, the Australian messaging guru, and pollster Mark Textor, all of whom helped Cameron secure a surprise majority in the 2015 election.

Gilbert, who left government after the Brexit referendum for PR firm Finsbury, returned to run the campaign. Messina was hiking on a volcano in Iceland when he took the call asking him to help. Crosby was on vacation celebrating his wife’s 60th birthday. Within days they were back in London.

Without a domestic opposition, as Corbyn was given up for dead by the media, May invented one — Brussels.

On May 3, the prime minister strolled outside No. 10 Downing Street to declare war on the EU after leaked accounts of a poisonously hostile dinner date between May and European Commission President Juncker.

In openly hostile language, May accused Brussels of making “threats” against Britain and deliberately leaking misleading information “to affect the result of the general election.”

“This is a bruise we need to keep kicking,” Crosby, who came up with the attack, told colleagues, according to a senior Tory official. It was a deliberate attempt to create an enemy to encourage the electorate to rally around May as their Brexit champion. There was some disquiet in Tory ranks about it, by those who thought it wasn’t in character for her, but it seemed to be working.

“It was the high point of her campaign,” a senior government official close to the prime minister said.

The next day, May 4, came nationwide local elections that served to reinforce the narrative of landslide inevitability despite the result, a convincing but not historic 38-27 win for the Tories over Labour. Britain's doyenne of pollsters, Professor John Curtice, warned the results — an 8 percent swing to the Tories — pointed to a comfortable win in the general election but not a landslide. Still the narrative would not shift.

As the campaign progressed, the messaging that had been so strong at the start started to come off as more negative, uninspiring and unceasingly repetitive.

Ayesha Hazarika, a senior adviser to the former Labour Leader Ed Miliband, said the Tories' biggest mistake was to focus their campaign on May. Anyone with a "modicum of objectivity" would have understood that May was not a "natural confident, fluent performer," she said. "She doesn’t come alive in front of a crowd.”

“It was all so inept,” said a senior Tory MP involved in the campaign, speaking on the Friday after the election. “The Dalek messaging — strong-and-stable — the lack of listening, fingers in the ears and chanting 'Brexit Brexit Brexit' when people were trying to signal something.”

Labour, on the other hand, tried throughout to shift the conversation to austerity. Led by Seumas Milne, Karie Murphy and Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s inner circle ignored advice to hide Corbyn away, opening their campaign up to reporters to stir criticism of the Tories for not doing the same.

By focusing on policy they hoped to lure their opponents into making theirs up on the fly. Large rallies and regular policy announcements gave evening news bulletins something to lead on, while the Tories struggled to get noticed with boring campaign events closed from public view and nothing new to say.

"You cannot protect the public on the cheap,” Corbyn said the day after terrorists killed seven people and injured 48 on London Bridge, dominating headlines.

His last rally was in his constituency of Islington, North London, where shortly after 9 p.m. Corbyn appeared on stage at the two hundred year old Union Chapel, a working nonconformist church and concert venue, to a cacophonous cheer. Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry warmed up the crowd, telling them that the “real star” of the campaign was not Corbyn, but the Labour manifesto.

“Jeremy would agree with that,” said James Schneider, Corbyn’s young adviser, who was brought into the top team from the left-wing mass membership movement Momentum.

Looking out at ecstatic faces throughout the hall and spilling out onto the street outside, Corbyn told the faithful that Labour’s campaign represented “the new center ground politics, what people actually want.”

While his leader was speaking, Schneider, checked his phone and came across the Sun newspaper’s polling day front page, which had just landed on Twitter. “Don’t Chuck Britain in the Cor-bin” ran the headline. He passed it round the team, who found it funny.

Attacks on Corbyn by the traditional media were dismissed by the Labour leader as signs that the mainstream political class was out of touch with the public.

Back at the Conservative HQ, little changed. At the start of the campaign Gilbert spoke first in all-staff meetings, followed by Crosby. As the campaign reached its climax Crosby slowly took over with messaging — his forte — increasingly central. In the final week Crosby was first to address the staff.

“Remember, Lynton had no relationship with her [May],” one of the most senior figures in the campaign said. “He doesn’t want to be running the thing — it almost killed him last time. His pacemaker was literally pumping out of his chest.”

The messaging remained tightly disciplined and increasingly negative. Inside Tory HQ they were confident. “This race is going to end as it started,” one of the campaign’s top officials told POLITICO, a week out from the vote. “She’s going to ask who’s best to negotiate Brexit. The more people who make their decision on that question the better.”

A CAMPAIGN'S HUBRIS

n election night, the 12 most senior figures — including Hill, Timothy, Crosby, Messina, Gilbert and Textor — gathered to hear the exit poll in private before filtering back out into the main open-plan room at campaign headquarters where the rest of the staff watched the forecast of a hung parliament in horror.

“The room fell completely silent,” one staffer in the room said. “It was really depressing."

Crosby spoke up in an attempt to lighten the mood. "He was like ‘what’s everyone doing? You can talk, you can smile’.”

Just two days before, the Tory team was bullish, convinced that the momentum had turned back in their direction. One minister told POLITICO May would return a substantial majority and commentators who suggested Corbyn could beat expectations would face “pretty searching questions.”

The minister was particularly critical of a newspaper "commentariat" who he felt overplayed Corbyn's rise. “For some people who have been looking at this [from the outside] it has been quite a self-indulgent campaign,” the minister said. A few days later the minister was kicked out of parliament by voters.

Throughout the campaign, May’s team were convinced, despite concern about her weaknesses as a candidate, that the fundamental politics of Britain post Brexit would deliver them victory. Corbyn, they said, was simply not a credible prime minister and by backing a hard Brexit, May had ensured the support of a major chunk of UKIP's voters. The calculation was half-right. May saw a 5.5 percent boost in her support — but Corbyn did even better, increasing Labour's vote by 9.5 percent.

May's team didn't start out overconfident, and appeared to get the risk of taking the public and good poll numbers for granted. Timothy and Hill made a point of telling Messina, Crosby and Textor that the first thing they needed to do was deal with soaring expectations, according to one senior figure in Tory HQ familiar with the conversation.

But as weeks wore on, the Tory campaign appeared to grow complacent. Shock polls, such as analysis by YouGov predicting a hung parliament published in the Times a week before the election, were dismissed by May's team. Messina tweeted the head of YouGov to say: “Spent the day laughing at yet another stupid poll from [YouGov].” That poll proved accurate.

Internally, eyebrows were raised at the “aggressive strategy” of targeting seats with comfortable Labour majorities in the final week of the campaign despite a major tightening in the polls. Representations were made to the Tory high command that it was too optimistic but were ignored, one senior campaign official said.

An analysis by the Guardian found the prime minister spent more than half the campaign in Labour-held seats, and just a fifth of her stops were in Tory marginals. Corbyn, on the other hand, who attended a total of 90 rallies during the short campaign, visited many areas where the Labour party had a sizeable majority.

Announcing his resignation, Timothy lamented the campaign's targeting failures.

"One can speculate about the reasons for this, but the simple truth is that Britain is a divided country: Many are tired of austerity, many remain frustrated or angry about Brexit, and many younger people feel they lack the opportunities enjoyed by their parents’ generation," he wrote. "The Conservative election campaign, however, failed to get this and Theresa’s positive plan for the future across. It also failed to notice the surge in Labour support, because modern campaigning techniques require ever-narrower targeting of specific voters, and we were not talking to the people who decided to vote for Labour."

Timothy's attack exposes problems within the campaign. But the result was a disaster for almost everyone involved, from Crosby, Messina and Gilbert to May, Timothy, Hill and the eight ministers who lost their seats.

The exception is Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson who disappeared from view on Friday to "work in the foreign office" without saying a word in support of the prime minister and emerged in weekend speculation as a possible replacement for May.