Nigel Farage is coming to Westminster and he’s bringing a football team-sized army

Reform UK party leader Nigel Farage speaks to a crowd in Clacton-on-Sea on July 3. Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

TICK. Tick. Tick. Tick. Boom. The exit poll went off on BBC1 like one of those Bonfire Night catastrophes where all the fireworks go off at once. “Blimey,” said Chris Mason. Blimey indeed. It is still unclear if the eventual results will be legally binding in the absence of David Dimbleby, but if they are, they were not unclear: 410 to Labour. 131 to the Conservatives.

There was so much blimey it took a while to even spot that rather large 61 number for the Liberal Democrats and fully 13 for Reform. Nigel Farage is coming to Westminster and he’s bringing a football team-sized army. People used to joke that you could fit the Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Party in a minicab. Now you’d need a full carriage of the Colossus rollercoaster at Thorpe Park.

Naturally, it took two minutes for the damage limitation exercise to start. “I think the Conservative Party will be relieved,” said George Osborne on ITV. It was not, he said, the “extinction level event” that had been feared. They will, apparently, be “pleased”.

Nigel Farage. Picture: Henry Nicholls/AFP

Back on the BBC things quickly turned brutal. “We’re sorry to do this to you Steve,” said Reeta Chakrabarti, as she pointed first to a massive graphic on the wall and then to the real-life Steve Baker, who had just appeared in the studio. “But we’re giving you less than a 1 per cent chance of holding on.”

Asked what had gone wrong, Baker chose to praise Rishi Sunak’s “ability to really grip detail, as I saw in the Windsor Framework”,

In the end, it has transpired that gripping the detail of the Windsor Framework was not quite enough.

In a long six-week campaign, Labour had refused to get ahead of themselves, refused to get carried away. At first evidence, they may still be carrying on claiming it’s still anyone’s game right up to election night 2029. Angela Rayner appeared under a large umbrella and said only that they “won’t be counting our chickens”. But there are moments when it is possibly acceptable to consider losing your head.

It had been a very slow build-up. Election days are absolutely all filler and precisely zero killer. What can you say when you can’t say anything?

Well you can show excitable clips of Sir Keir Starmer and his wife strolling in to their local polling station in Camden. The waiting crowds were not small and might have hoped for more than an extremely thin smile, but these are nervy times. They had at least already got to see the actor Charles Dance head in a few minutes before, whose own short time as prime minister was beset with sex-tape scandals and the unlawful detonation of a leisure centre in Staines (as viewers of Ali G InDaHouse will know).

Keir Starmer walks with his wife Victoria Starmer. Picture: Leon Neal/Getty Images

No one seemed to have come out to watch Sunak, as he and Akshata Murty made their quiet way in Kirby Sigston village hall, overlooked by some rather large cow sheds.

Forbidden from discussing actual news, the day had given over to constitutional speculation. Experts at various constitutional think tanks were forced to answer questions like “Who is in charge of the country if a prime minister loses his seat before the election result is confirmed?”

The answer, for what it’s worth, is still the prime minister, right up until the point at which he’s been to see the King. But even discussion of the subject is not what you’d call a good omen.

The leading Nigel Farage-based news item was “Nigel Farage takes stroll in Clacton-on-Sea”. It was certainly accurate. There was a 21 second-long clip of Farage wearing a navy blazer and walking silently in a straight line past a well kept rose bush.

Ed Davey arrived on foot at his own polling station in Surbiton, southwest London, but is understood to have left by zorb.

For a big beast on the brink, having Jon Craig of Sky News rock up at your count on election night is not unlike a crumbling dictator being informed of the presence of John Simpson in the old town square.

That he selected the Edge Leisure Centre in Haslemere, Surrey, as the likely home of the Big Story was not the ideal start to Jeremy Hunt’s very long night. In the rarefied pre-exit poll hour, news of Sunak’s outgoing honours list emerged, including a peerage for his chief of staff Liam Booth-Smith. We have not yet been told exactly what for, but he will of course not be the first man to have been recognised for his role in an evacuation from the beaches of northern France.

A lot of people were staring down the barrel of a long night, into the very small hours indeed, but from one second past ten, it was already Goodnight Vienna.

The Times