ON election day The Sun’s front page featured a cartoon of Jeremy Corbyn with a list of reasons why you shouldn’t vote for him.

At the top of that list were the words “Terrorists’ Friend”.

The message was clear. As the nation recovered from the Manchester and London attacks how could we trust someone who had dared in the past to sit down with people who furthered their cause with bullets and bombs? No matter that the British government had been holding clandestine talks with IRA leaders to end the Troubles years before Mr Corbyn tried to improve Anglo-Irish relations or broker talks with Hamas.

Theresa May is now waking up to the fact that politics involves an awful lot of compromise. This means that sometimes you will have to deal with people possessing rather colourful back stories. The idea that she would be forced to cosy up to the DUP would have been unthinkable when she called her snap election in the hope that it would strengthen her arm in crunch talks with Brussels. But Mrs May's “do it my way or else” message fell flat with many voters on Thursday.

To prop up her leadership she has now been forced to form an alliance with a party led by Peter Robinson - a man who helped establish loyalist paramilitary group Ulster Resistance. DUP chiefs later tried to wash their hands of the group after it emerged UR had been involved in gun running to smuggle rocket launchers, assault rifles, and grenades into the UK. By the Sun’s twisted logic does that now make our Prime Minister the friend of a friend of terrorists?  

Mrs May’s gamble and subsequent election campaign was a catalogue of misjudgement. She was correct about one thing however. This was the Brexit election only not the one that she envisaged. The influence of soft Brexiteers from Belfast will see to that.