What an extraordinary election that was!

Jeremy Corbyn started with low expectations and massively exceeded them.

Theresa May started as one of the most popular Prime Ministers ever and is now on her way to becoming one of the least popular.

The Labour manifesto went down very well. It provided real hope that we could have a better Britain and persuaded large numbers of people to vote for the first time.

The Tory manifesto was a complete disaster and lost them swathes of votes.

The Dementia Tax, ending the Triple Lock and scrapping Winter Fuel Payments for most pensioners angered a key group of their supporters.

Pledging to bring back fox hunting was just sticking two fingers up to the majority of the population.

Astonishingly, none of their promises - unlike all of Labour’s - were costed.

The fatal miscalculation the Tories made was that Theresa May was so popular they could base their entire campaign around just her.

What a massive mistake that was. Seven weeks scrutiny cruelly exposed her many shortcomings.

The key moment was when she performed her u-turn on the Dementia Tax. The unprecedented turnaround on a key manifesto pledge was made worse when she tried to deny anything had changed.

The scales fell from people’s eyes and they realised that the Empress had no clothes.

“Strong and stable” became “weak and wobbly” in the blink of an eye. Her reputation never recovered, and never will.

She has shown herself to be untrustworthy, prone to coming up with ill-thought out schemes and likely to back down at the first sign of pressure.

And we are expected to believe that someone with these blatant character flaws is best placed to negotiate Brexit!

The deal she is stitching together with the DUP to cling on to power shows she will always put party above country.

She has driven a coach and horses through the Good Friday agreement which brought peace to Northern Ireland. She has hitched the Tories to a group of people with links to terrorists and with social attitudes completely out of step with the rest of Britain.

This will not end well.

• David Ellesmere is the leader of Ipswich Borough Council.