Theresa May's aide's brutal verdict on her disastrous 2017 general election

Theresa May was ‘surly’ and ‘not particularly pleasant’ during her disastrous 2017 election campaign, her former joint chief of staff has claimed.

Fiona Hill says she was forced to become the then-Prime Minister’s full-time minder after she ‘began to crumble’ amid mounting criticism of her campaigning and the Tory election manifesto.

Hill makes the claims in a new biography which says May, who quit as PM earlier this year, insisted that she did not want the presidential-style campaign to be focused on her.

Historian Sir Anthony Seldon has interviewed nearly all of the influential figures during her premiership for his book, May at 10, and he concluded the campaign “cruelly exposed her unusually inflexible and introverted character”.

The biography, serialised in the Times , claims the controversy over the eventually revised social care policy – labelled the ‘dementia tax’ – led to the unravelling of May’s credibility.

“Her team had thought the most likely manifesto backlash would come over a fuel allowance change,” he writes.

“Social care had played well in focus groups when tested. [May’s election adviser Lynton] Crosby approved of it. The sceptic was Hill, who foresaw what would happen.

“It became the focus of her most bitter disagreement with [fellow No 10 chief of staff Nick] Timothy during their time together in No 10. May backed him. ‘If I don’t have it in my manifesto, it will become an empty manifesto,’ she said.”

Seldon says former aides told him that May sought to avoid speaking to journalists or revealing personal details.

“This is not what I believe in,” she reportedly said. “I want to be out campaigning.”

Hill, with Timothy, said she was forced to travel by May’s side.

“She was surly and not particularly pleasant,” she told Seldon. “She was very quiet and seemed unhappy.”

Another said: “She was a terrible campaigner. She came across as grumpy, entitled and expecting to win, and then visibly irritated when she came under scrutiny.”

The criticism reached such a level that on social media the PM was dubbed RoboMay for her robotic and repetitive style of delivery.

The Conservatives had been expected to win a landslide victory in June 2017, but although the party increased its share of the vote it lost 13 seats and its majority as support for Labour surged.

However, after the election result May is said to have blamed her advisers and “complained bitterly that she had done exactly what they had told her to do and this was the result”.

Timothy offered to resign in the aftermath, at which point Hill recalls May as saying: “I think you both need to resign.”

May was also criticised over what was said to be her failure to show a strong face to the public after terrorist attacks in Manchester and London.

Seldon, the vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham who has also written political biographies of Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair , Gordon Brown and David Cameron, writes that the campaign “cruelly exposed her unusually inflexible and introverted character”.

But he reveals that May did not appear to have the final say over some of the messaging.

She is said not to have liked the “strong and stable” slogan which became an oft-repeated mantra.

“I’m the leader of the Conservative party, not a presidential candidate,” May said, according to the book. “I’m not comfortable. I don’t want it to be about me.”