IIt was as if the world had stopped. Time slowed as 10pm approached. The wait became unbearable. In the ITV studios, presenters, pundits and reporters nervously practiced their lines, filling the time before the polls closed and the exit poll results were published. Democracy can be surprisingly tense; it’s a moment in the election cycle when the power lies with the people, not the politicians.
Exit polls are rarely wrong. They have never failed to predict the largest party. They only made one small mistake, in 2015, when they failed to predict a Conservative majority. Today, the exit poll is revered like a holy relic. It shapes the story of the entire evening. A definitive verdict on the accuracy of all the other polls conducted in the past weeks and months. The final word on the ambitions of party leaders. From zero to hero, and vice versa.
The clock began to tick slowly. Minutes felt like hours. Tom Bradby ended the suspense after Big Ben struck for the last time. Labour won a landslide victory with a majority of 170 seats. Labour was projected to win 410 seats. The Conservatives had just 131. The Liberal Democrats had a good night with 61 seats. The Reform Party had 13 seats. The Scottish National Party was all but wiped out with just 10 seats.
It may not have been as devastating a defeat as the Conservatives feared, but it was still a disaster – their worst result in history. Ed Balls tried not to look too smug. Neither did George Osborne, who still has some bitterness to settle within his own party.
And then the post-mortem began. Mr Osborne, pale and seemingly in an anti-tanning bed, slammed Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. He cannot help but defend his achievements. Mr Starmer has taken on the party’s extremists; Mr Sunak has not.
Bradby turned his attention to Nicola Sturgeon. There was an ongoing police investigation into the SNP, he said. That couldn’t have helped. Ouch. Nicola gasped and wondered why she’d accepted an invitation to appear on the show.
Meanwhile Tom is having the time of his life. He hasn’t been this excited for years. Cut to the seat predictions. Jeremy Hunt, Grant Shapps and Penny Mordaunt are all up for toast. The country can relax a little. Not so for Riche. We cut to live coverage of his seat and it’s reported he’s planning to stay up all night. The man is a masochist. Reach for the fentanyl.
Labour’s front-runner is Angela Rayner. There’s very little light to be seen. Clearly she’s under orders not to look too excited. She’s here to serve. But after 14 years in opposition, a smile every now and then would be a good thing. At least she had an umbrella to protect her from the rain. Labour promised change and Angela delivered. She has no drowned rats.
It was a while before the first Conservative member came forward. A sad-faced Robert Buckland stepped forward. He too has not been in this Parliament long. He railed against the knee-jerk populism of the Conservative right. He hoped his party would not disappear down the reform rabbit hole. “Hold on for a beer,” an email from a neo-con populist told me in my inbox. They are planning to do just that. The Conservatives seem hell-bent on ripping apart what’s left of them. Happy days.
Towards the end of the night I interviewed Neil Kinnock. It was a wonderful moment. He was very open about his feelings and, like many of us, wondered if we would ever see another Labour government. Dreams do come true sometimes.
Nicola, on the other hand, has remained largely silent. Once you’ve been bitten, you never go near it again. Perhaps her lawyers tried to remind her by text message to say “no comment.” This will be a night she will never want to remember.
Things weren’t so smooth on other channels either: just after polling chief John Curtice put a red flag on Reform’s projected 13 seats, the BBC’s research committee decided that the Reform Party was the big story of the night.
Hmm. I’m not sure about that. The truth is, they elected a new government with an overwhelming majority. The reforms may have helped, but the people who voted for them knew what they were doing. They couldn’t care less about putting Keir Starmer in Downing Street. In fact, they were happy.
If you want to hear something aggressive, Channel 4 is the place to go. Alastair Campbell and Nadine Dorries were at each other’s throats from the start, arguing mainly about Boris Johnson, yet it wasn’t the same as talking about Thursday’s election.
Returning to the battle, the first celebrity casualty was Robert Buckland, whose death note turned out to be a predicted one. His passing speech was a model of grace and humility, one unlikely to be repeated by many of his colleagues..
The first half of voting day was as eventless as ever. It was a day when the biggest sin for the media and politicians was to report real news. Not surprisingly, Radio 4’s Today programme struggled to fill its slots with no one to interview and no election news to report. Presenters Emma Barnett and Justin Webb seemed to be waiting for the clocks to be turned forward to 9am.
But some listeners may have found the whole broadcast a blessing: in exchange for a politician not being able to answer questions, they got three hours of non-confrontational broadcasting.
The closest thing to news was a piece about whether Joe Biden is too old to be re-elected. Cut to Joe saying he had a bad experience in the debate with Donald Trump. This is a pretty good look. Most people remember him having a terrible 90 minutes. The President of the United States is the last person to realize he’s a problem. Feel free to resign. No one will think bad of you.
Other than that, it ended up being a bedtime radio programme today. A bit like You and Yours. There was a lovely segment about two eagles who decided not to have chicks this year because they wanted to look after the one that got sick the previous year. Then, for those who were still awake, there was a story about a nine-year-old chess genius. Then a reboot of Holst’s suite, The Planets. And finally, a report on how to die peacefully. Let’s hope the Conservatives were listening to this. They’ll need some tips.
All party leaders have voted early. Mr Sunak and his wife, Akshata Murthy, smiled for the cameras on their way to their polling station in North Yorkshire but said nothing – perhaps they just needed a little time to themselves.
At his final rally on Wednesday night in Hampshire (where a previously safe Conservative stronghold is once again under threat), Mr Sunak said he was proud of the campaign he had run. Because National Service had been a huge success. Because looking like a drowned schoolboy outside Downing Street was the perfect slogan. Because abandoning the D-Day veterans in Normandy was the right thing to do. Who cares about old men and women over a hundred years old? But of course, Rich! It wouldn’t change a thing.
Sunak ran home in a hurry. He needed solitude. The job was done. And deep down he knew it wasn’t enough. He may have been a bad Prime Minister, but he’s not stupid at all. The numbers make sense. His morning tweet reeked of defeatism: “Don’t give Labour a supermajority.” Not a very encouraging message for anyone considering voting Conservative. It was a cry of “we know we’ve lost, help us not lose too badly.”
All that was left was to wait. Wait, wait, wait.
