Elections can be fun, honestly. What it’s like covering the “World Cup for politics nerds.”
Everyone needs a hobby, I suppose.
Elections first became a thing for me at a disturbingly young age. My mother, who worked for her local council in Lancashire, used to run a polling station. And so, at 6am on election day, I was there, tying the ballot pencils onto bits of string and sticking up the notices.
When the voting ended the ballot box, sealed with wax, was taken to the count. We checked in, and entered a hall filled with nervous-looking people, rosettes pinned to their jackets. It was all very odd, and weirdly exciting.
I’ve taken leave to watch election results, spent hours playing with “predict the result” pages on websites, and — to my surprise and delight, ended up being paid to report on and analyse the campaigns.
This is not, I accept, a normal reaction to a General Election. But, I promise, they’re a lot more exciting than you might think.
In an age where politicians and the public rarely meet, campaigns throw our leaders into the real world for a few weeks. Awkward rallies, ridiculous photo-opportunities, even the occasional fight. And, at its heart, fundamental questions about what direction the country should take in the coming years.
Staying up all night? Remember the snacks
Election night result programmes are an exhausting, exciting endurance test. A twelve-hour rollercoaster ride, from the exit poll through the middle-of-the-night concession speech, to the victor walking into Downing Street.
Of course, most people covering election night never see a minute of it. In 1997, as Tony Blair cruised into office in a Labour landslide, I was running around an echoey hall in Swansea, chasing down two of his more than 400 newly-elected MPs.
In later elections I’d be on the bulletins desk, trying to sum up everything that was happening in 3 minutes. But by 2010, I’d reached the promised land — the election night studio.
My role was to sit alongside the presenter, ready to offer instant analysis of whatever had just happened. It was a while since I’d done this much revision, and at ten-to-ten I had a sudden panic: what if I forgot all the vital information I’d been trying to learn? What if, despite all that preparation, I just wasn’t very good? I imagined being silently led out of the studio an hour later.
Thankfully that didn’t happen. Asked to respond to an early, unexpected result, I heard myself talking in a relatively lucid and knowledgable way. Turned out I did know what I was talking about.
Election night is meant to be the exhausting final act of the campaign, but in 2010 it wasn’t. I remember stumbling off air at 9.30am, almost 12 hours after we started, to be told our afternoon OB from Westminster was starting earlier than planned, at 2pm. The hotel bed reserved for me was never disturbed as coalition talks got underway.
In a decade of election night marathons a few things stand out. Accidentally bringing a candidate to the verge of tears by asking them what went wrong, witnessing a punch-up in Poplar when people accosted John Prescott with a toilet seat, and a scuppered raid on LBC’s fruit bowl for vital late-night sustenance.
Those with long memories may recall Nigel Farage effectively conceded defeat soon after the Brexit referendum vote ended. A little later, Peter Kellner — one of the UK’s most respected opinion pollsters — leaned towards me in the BBC studio we were sharing and whispered “I’ve been looking at these numbers, and I’m pretty certain it’s going to be a leave vote.”
That’s perhaps what makes election night so exciting. The country’s future is being decided, and you’re both witnessing it and trying to explain it to everyone else.
Is it normal to like elections this much? Almost certainly not. But then again, is it normal to build a giant model railway in your garage? Or re-enact historic battles on a winter weekend? Everyone’s a little bit odd, I suppose.
