PRIME Minister Theresa May says shed a tear when she realised that her snap General Election gamble had failed.

In an interview to mark her first year in office, the Tory leader told the BBC she was “devastated” by the election result that saw her lose David Cameron’s slim majority.

Though the Prime Minister admitted she aware her party’s campaign “wasn’t going perfectly”, the exit poll predicting the Tories would not have enough MPs to form a government still came as a shock.

“I was shocked at the result that had come through in the exit poll,” May told BBC Radio 5Live interviewer Emma Barnett.

“It took a few minutes for it to sort of sink in, what that was telling me. My husband gave me a hug, and then I got on the phone to the Conservative party to find out what had happened.

“I felt, I suppose, devastated really. I knew the campaign wasn’t going perfectly, but still the messages I was getting from people I was speaking to, but also the comments we were getting back from a lot of people that were being passed on to me, were that we were going to get a better result than we did.”

Asked if she shed a tear when Philip hugged her, May replied: “Yes, a little tear, at that moment.”

May pointed out that result had caught everyone off guard.

“As the campaign was going on I realised that everything wasn’t going perfectly, but throughout the whole campaign the expectation still was that the result was going to be a different one, a better one for us than it was,” she said. “We didn’t see the result that came coming.

“If I’m honest, I’ve heard stories about quite a few Labour MPs who didn’t think they were going to keep their seats and ended up keeping those seats. So when the result came through it was a complete shock.”

Asked if she had considered resigning after the election, May said she “felt there was a responsibility there, to ensure that the country still had a government”.

She said: “Going through that night I was seeing really good colleagues who I’d worked with, who were losing their seats. Again, I used the word devastating, because it is pretty devastating – it’s very distressing when you see people that you know have done a good job lose their seats.

“I called the election, I led the campaign and I take responsibility for what happened. But there’s also a responsibility for the future, for the country, and that was about ensuring the country had a government.”

Barnett first asked May if she considered herself to be a feminist, and when the Prime Minister said yes then asked why she had done a deal with Northern Ireland’s DUP.

May replied to say there would be no “tow back at all in anything we’ve done on the equalities agenda”.