Long Election Night

[davidn]

I think that this is the first time that I've stayed up to watch the results of the UK elections coming in - ironically, being five hours behind the country now helps with that, because they've been at it for about a quarter of a day now and one tenth of the available seats have been declared. The exit polls seemed to indicate that it was going to go pretty much as expected - the Conservative party getting a lot more seats but nobody having a majority.

Highlights so far have included:

• Just about everyone from the BBC News ever coming back for a gigantic sort of news end-of-series special
• Large numbers of people having been turned away because of not enough ballot papers or staff at the polling places - we were behind to America on this for many years, but it looks like we've finally reached their democratic standard
• The swingometer, which this year is being presented from the BBC holodeck
• Pax-Man being tough on everyone right from the start, from as innocent a question as just asking three party representatives what they thought of the exit polls
• One Labour politician almost managing to make it through an interview with him without being sneered at
• The reaction to Sadiq Khan retaining his seat

But most genuinely surprising was the complete non-appearance in the exit poll of the Lib Dem surge that was going to happen. They're still just about hanging on, but the numbers indicated it was far from a seat-grabbing bonanza and maybe even a couple of losses. We'll have to wait to see, but it looks like it's going to be a long time yet.