The Conservatives weren’t ready for June’s snap election in which the party lost its parliamentary majority despite leading in opinion polls, leader Theresa May said in an interview Thursday.
“By definition in a snap election you’ve not been able to prepare people for it,” May told House Magazine, acknowledging the party machinery was not set up for the election.
May also conceded she failed to communicate the central message of her campaign.
“When I came into Downing Street I stood on the steps and I set out my platform for the future. That didn’t come through in the election,” the prime minister said.
She also acknowledged the Tories needed to run “a less centralized campaign” that reflected the grassroots.
“An awful lot of people out there in the party worked hard on the ground, and there is a feeling that there wasn’t the ability to do what they wanted to do,” May said. “There weren’t the links with the center that there should have been.”
May clung onto power with support from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party.
In a YouGov poll published by the Times Friday ahead of the Tories’ annual conference next week, just 29 percent of party members said they wanted May to contest the next British general election. Some 5 percent want her to step down as leader immediately, 8 percent want her gone next year, 38 percent after Brexit in 2019 and 13 percent just before the next election, according to the poll.
Boris Johnson is members’ favored successor to May, with 23 percent choosing the foreign secretary as their preferred Tory leader and 69 percent saying he is currently doing a good job. Scottish Conservatives leader Ruth Davidson was the second most popular choice on 19 percent, followed by MP Jacob Rees-Mogg on 17 percent and Brexit Secretary David Davis on 11 percent.