Dear Theresa May, If There's One Thing You Learn From This Election I Hope It's a Lesson In How To Be Grateful

From a person on the outside looking in, it feels like the Tory leader listened to the minority swanning through the corridors of power and forgot the majority walking the streets of a nation she was supposed to represent. Don't take people for granted, Mrs May. Stay grateful.
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Eddie Keogh / Reuters

As daylight streamed through my wooden venetian blinds, waking me up to another day, my mind refused to leave the night before. How could one woman, who seemed to have it all, not only lose it but lose it so badly?

As I moved at glacial speed to the kitchen to make my morning coffee, my brain, also moving at glacial speed, slowly shifted subjects from politics to life, my life.

Breathing in the aroma of coffee, I looked outside the window and was immensely grateful. What follows, may sound like stupidly small things to you but trust me, to me, they're pretty big.

I was grateful for a window. A couple of years ago, I rented a small room with no windows and I had never realised until that point in time how much I actually enjoyed looking outside a window.

I was grateful for the lack of mice. Again, flashback a couple of years to a vermin-infested house I lived in, where I had to wake up at 3am (almost everyday) to take out small furry creatures that I found squealing in the traps around my room.

I was grateful for a job. If you've ever been in the position of wondering when your next pay check is due, you won't need much explanation around this.

Yes, I realise people have bigger life problems than this but my point is not so much about windows and mice but more about Theresa May and her indifference to the position she had.

She seems to have taken her platform and the people she was supposed to represent for granted, valuing the advice of her top strategists over the voice of the people.

Even when it seemed like her campaign was about the people, it wasn't. Bolton, where May launched her campaign, was a prime example of a politician forgetting the people. She flew in, in a helicopter, did her election thing and then left - without taking questions. No surprise then that Labour hung on to the people of Bolton.

A look at Tory backbencher, MP Sarah Wollaston's tweets, and we get little clue about where May's exclusive approach stems from: "I cannot see how the inner circle of special advisers can continue in post. Needs to be far more inclusive in future."

The special advisers she is talking about are Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill.

In a piece for The Times, Katie Perrior, the former director of communications at No 10, sheds light on the kind of exclusive internal operation these two strategists ran.

"What I could never work out was whether Mrs May condoned their behaviour and turned a blind eye or didn't understand how destructive they both were," she writes.

"For all the love of a hierarchy, the chiefs treated cabinet members exactly the same - rude, abusive, childish behaviour."

From a person on the outside looking in, it feels like the Tory leader listened to the minority swanning through the corridors of power and forgot the majority walking the streets of a nation she was supposed to represent.

Don't take people for granted, Mrs May. Stay grateful.