THERESA May, you had one job... and you blew it. How our (at the time of writing) prime minister must wish she could turn the clock back and never call the general election that she didn’t need to call. How she must wish she hadn’t taken heed of the opinion polls and been seduced by their indications of a 20-plus point lead over Labour.

Disaster, Mayhem, Maybot, arrogance and hubris are just some of the words (made up and otherwise) being flung around in the wake of a truly staggeringly inept and miscalculated Conservative election campaign, during which Theresa May to all intents and purposes managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

So how did she achieve her quite remarkable feat?

Two words: She assumed. She assumed the voting public would never be irresponsible enough to bring Jeremy Corbyn within spitting distance of 10 Downing Street. She assumed a majority was in the bag. She assumed young voters would stay true to form and not bother to turn out on polling day. She assumed she had the charisma to pull off a personality-driven campaign. And – most spectacularly wrongly of all – she assumed she could easily win an election with a largely negative message.

Mrs May’s “strong and stable” mantra is now, rightly, a joke. In a campaign dogged by U-turns, unpopular policies and an almost autistic inability to engage with a public she wanted to vote for her, Mrs May merely managed to come across as weak, one-dimensional and seriously lacking in judgment.

Her public appearances were just awful. Toe-curling interviews in which she talked about “girl jobs and boy jobs” or described the naughtiest thing she ever did as running through wheat fields to the mild chagrin of a farmer, harmed her more than she and her presidential inner circle could ever have dreamed. She came across as charmless, dull and ever so slightly odd.

If you’re going to run a campaign based on personality rather than policies, it is surely axiomatic that the candidate in question actually has a discernible personality. It is no wonder Mrs May became known as the Maybot during this disastrous campaign, so robotic did she appear. Possessing a shoe collection to rival that of Imelda Marcos does not make a person charismatic.

Jeremy Corbyn, on the other hand, played a blinder of a campaign on a personal level, coming across as an engaging bloke of real convictions. His brand of conviction politics may be one that wishes to take us back to the union stranglehold of the 1970s and 80s, and to turn Britain into a colder version of Venezuala, but at least he showed some passion. And that resonated.

Yes, any half-competent accountant could have made mincemeat in minutes of his economically illiterate manifesto; but that didn’t matter to the hundreds of thousands of young people who turned out to vote for him.

While Mr Corbyn was promising economic ruin by inter alia abolishing students tuition fees and seducing young voters with the promise of wiping out any accrued student debt (a promise which surely sailed perilously close to the murky waters of illegal electoral bribes), Mrs May left her Conservative candidates with little to offer a fed-up electorate but a “dementia tax” (guaranteed to alienate her core voters) and a pointless free vote on fox-hunting.

Disastrously advised by her too-small team, she shut out her Cabinet colleagues and left her candidates floundering. It was all about her, Theresa May, with her party and its ideals nowhere to be seen. Jeremy Corbyn might have lost the election (which a lot of people – himself included – seem to be forgetting) but Theresa May certainly didn’t win it.

Instead of banging on ad nauseam about strong and stable her, Mrs May should have been spreading a message of hope about what life post-Brexit would be like. About the economic opportunities available in a world away from the technocrats of the EU. About encouraging businesses. About free market Conservatism. About a smaller state and bigger personal freedoms. She and her campaign team did none of this - and on Thursday night they paid the price.

The fallout of this shambles will be lasting – not least for the Brexit negotiations Mrs May now enters in a fatally diminished position.

Harold Wilson said that a week is a long time in politics. An election-weary country would certainly agree with that after the dramas of the last seven days.