Theresa May, the new Hillary Clinton

LONDON — She was well ahead in the polls but ran a lousy campaign. Robotic, uninspiring, buttoned-up, inflexible, humorless, charmless and formulaic, she repelled voters even though she was vastly more qualified than her opponent. Sound familiar? Yes, Theresa May was the Hillary Clinton of this British general election.

Voters on both sides of the Atlantic sent their politicians a clear message. They want honesty, candor, humanity and authenticity from their representatives. They want questions answered, not dodged. They want a real conversation, not vacuous slogans. And they hate seeing their intelligence insulted.

That’s why they punish disingenuousness so harshly. When May claimed, five weeks into the campaign, that her U-turn on social care was no such thing, the blunder marked the beginning of a disastrous slide in her opinion poll ratings. It wasn’t simply that she appeared weak and wobbly, and deviated from her tedious “strong and stable” mantra. She took the voters for fools.

Tin Lady

In this, May closely resembles former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who saw his popularity plummet when he called off a planned election and denied that it was anything to do with his party’s slippage in the polls. Everyone knew perfectly well that he was lying. And they never forgave him.

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown | Leon Neal/Getty Images

Like May, Brown lacked the emotional intelligence and ability to bond with voters. Like her, he was a control freak, neurotically paranoid about his colleagues and the press. Like her, he had a tin ear and struggled to act naturally — he couldn’t even smile in a way that appeared genuine. And like her, he was punished in the polls.

This election showed us — if there was ever any doubt — that character is as important in politics as policy.

Look at the Conservatives’ performance in Scotland. Campaigning on the same manifesto, apart from a tiny tweak on pensioner benefits, the Scottish Conservatives gained an astonishing 12 seats from the Scottish National Party, going up from one seat at the 2015 election to 13 today — their best performance since 1983.

Why? Up north, the party is led by Ruth Davidson, a feisty, working-class, kick-boxing lesbian with buckets of warmth, wit and charisma. She tells it like it is, and could only bring herself to say the words “strong” and “stable” with an ironic curl of the lip. Despite four decades of loathing the Conservatives, Scottish voters were won over by Davidson’s can-do candor. The message from this election to politicians is simple: humanity matters.

So, unfortunately for May, does judgment.

She never needed to call this general election. Her term didn’t run out until 2020. It was the most brutal act of self-harm since … well, since David Cameron’s equally unforced decision to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union last year.

Two Conservative prime ministers gambled and lost in the space of 12 months in the mistaken expectation of party advantage. But May is what you might call a slow learner. And from a woman who castigated her predecessor for treating politics like a game, she has been gambling with ridiculously high stakes.

Revenge of the Remainers

After hubris, as the Greeks told us, comes nemesis. Voters didn’t like being taken for granted, and they fought back. In particular, the young fought back.

Young voters, many of whom failed to vote in the EU referendum, and bitterly regretted it afterward, came out to vote in huge numbers. In the 2015 election, just 43 percent of under-25s cast a ballot; this year, preliminary estimates put the youth vote at about 72 percent. And the party they overwhelmingly supported was Labour.

Partly this was a verdict on May’s version of Brexit. She took the tiny majority in the June 2016 referendum as a mandate to pursue the harshest possible version of Brexit: drastic cuts in immigration, an end to the free movement of EU citizens, exit from the single market, no more subjection to the European Court of Justice. After this election, she no longer has this mandate, and it’s mainly thanks to the mobilization of young Remainers.

Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn arrives at Labour Headquarters on June 9, 2017 in London | Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

But the young — and indeed many of their elders — were also seduced by the land of milk and money promised by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. His manifesto was the most populist produced by a mainstream party in living memory.

You want free university tuition? Have it, he told the young. You want to keep all your pensioner benefits? Sure thing, he told the older generation. More money for schools and hospitals? Here you are, he told parents. Oh, and let’s spend tens of billions on nationalizing industries while we’re at it.

Land of dreams

If you offer voters everything they want — and tell them there’ll be no pain involved — is it any surprise when they vote for it? The enormous cost of Labour’s pledges was supposed to be borne by the richest 5 percent of earners and big corporations — a Quixotic hope, as any economist knows. You can’t have Nordic-style public spending without Nordic-style taxes, which means higher taxes for everyone.

All but the most left-wing Labour MPs know this in their hearts. Although they have to admit that Corbyn fought an unexpectedly successful campaign, they are unconvinced that these policies can be put into practice without enormous economic damage.

If you offer voters everything they want is it any surprise when they vote for it?

So there is a delicious irony to these election results.

Thanks to the collapse in the UKIP vote, both main party leaders have won a larger share of the national vote than any of their predecessors have for decades. Yet neither party leader has the support of their MPs in parliament.

Corbyn’s disagree with his policies but are stuck with him. May’s are furious that she has needlessly squandered a parliamentary majority. It is unlikely that they will put up with her for long.

Mary Ann Sieghart is a broadcaster and journalist. She chairs the non-partisan Social Market Foundation think tank.