What if. . . Theresa May hadn't called the 2017 general election?

Or, what if she'd called it and won the landslide everyone had predicted?

This wouldn’t have happened either

I had been invited to the BBC’s “election café” to watch the results of the 2017 election and to give reactions to developments throughout the night. Big mistake.

“Election café” is just as bad as it sounds. As a politics geek I like to drink in every detail of the TV news coverage at elections. But in the basement of Pacific Quay, BBC Scotland’s concrete and glass Soviet-style headquarters on the River Clyde, I could barely hear a word of coverage over the hubbub of fellow “party-goers” (oh God, I’m cringing again). And when the exit poll was announced, I couldn’t hear a word of what David Dimbleby was telling us. But I could read the headline: “Conservatives expected to be the biggest party”.

Wait, what? Biggest party? What happened to the landslide Theresa May was bound to win? Wasn’t that the reason she’d reneged on her promise, on taking office the previous year, not to hold an early election? To win a huge majority in order to be able to negotiate Brexit as a powerful prime minister?

Well, yes, that was indeed the plan. And as far as it went, it wasn’t a bad one. After winning the Copeland by-election in February that year – the first time a governing party had gained a seat from the opposition in a by-election since 1982 – the Tories were riding high against a Labour Party still riven by factionalism under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. May had risked her reputation as an honest and principled politician by performing a U-turn on her electoral promise, but it seemed worth it.

And then everything went wrong. May got in a tangle over how to pay for long-term social care and became a figure of ridicule for her robot-like rehearsed responses to questions and heckles. Corbyn, meanwhile, who was a much better performer outside of the House of Commons than inside it, seemed to thrive on the excitement of an unexpected election. The polls started to narrow, but surely a Tory majority was inevitable anyway?

Nope. The slim and unexpected overall majority won by David Cameron two years earlier and bequeathed to May in 2016 after Cameron’s resignation over the Leave vote in the EU referendum (you still keeping up?) was lost. Labour gained 30 seats while the Tories lost 13. Labour was still nearly 60 seats behind the Conservatives but the narrative had been set: Corbyn was the hero of the Labour movement because he hadn’t lost as badly as expected, while May was the real loser, having gambled on an election she didn’t need to call and having been exposed as possibly the worst prime ministerial campaigner in history.

We all know what happened next: Corbyn, who many had expected to resign following a calamitous defeat, was further entrenched in the leader’s office, while Theresa May became a prisoner of her own party as well as the Democratic Unionists of Northern Ireland, on whom she had to rely for an overall majority. More urgently, her bargaining hand in the Brexit negotiations was severely weakened. From the moment she emerged from her ministerial car outside Downing Street on the Friday morning, said a few uninspiring words to the assembled press and shuffled miserably inside the building, her days as prime minister were numbered.

Everything could have been so different. May might have resisted the advice of some around her who wanted to take advantage of Labour’s difficulties. She could have held true to her original determination to spare the country a second election within two years.