...and the moment the biggest gamble of his life paid off!
WHEN the exit poll dropped at 10pm, I had already been in the ITV studios for more than two hours of briefings, orientation and rehearsals for the through-the-night results show I was to be a part of.
The size of the projected Conservative majority caused an audible gasp in the room. Sitting less than 20ft from where I stood, the Leftwing commentator and chief Corbyn cheerleader, Owen Jones, grimaced as his face paled.
It took me a beat to look farther down the list, past the Labour number and to the SNP… 55 seats. Jo Johnson, the Prime Minister’s brother and former universities minister, asked me how many that was out of.
‘They’re projecting 55 out of 59. Nearly a clean sweep.’
It didn’t feel right but had happened before – in 2015 when, in a reaction to losing the independence referendum, an SNP tsunami deposed 50 sitting MPs and changed the political weather of both Scotland and the UK.
Election nights have a rhythm of their own. Between two referendums and repeated Westminster and Holyrood elections, I’ve been involved in election night broadcasts as either a journalist, pundit, candidate or party leader at every event for the past decade-and-a-half.
After weeks of frantic activity all round the country, you double your pace on election day – manning polling stations, calling voters, going door-todoor to ensure people actually cast their ballots... and all while continually checking on turnout, following trends, talking to other parties to see if they are seeing from their people the same picture you are seeing from yours.
Then 10pm comes. The crescendo that all of this activity has been working towards is reached and everything just… stops.
For two hours or so, nobody knows anything. No results have come in, no seats have been declared.
You are in Schrödinger’s election period – instead of a cat, you have ballots in a box which, until the box is opened, can hold any given result.
The excitement and trepidation is exquisite. For all that veteran politicians are a cynical bunch, I don’t know any who don’t dare to dream that they might – just might – have pulled off the unlikeliest victory, even if every indicator points otherwise.
An exit poll is the perfect time-filler as its detail allows discussion and analysis of what each individual seat likely to change hands means for the various parties, as well as what the overall result means for the country.
EARLIER in the week, I’d responded to a newspaper report discussing the possibility of the SNP winning 50 seats with a cheeky dismissal that I’d skinny-dip in Loch Ness on Hogmanay if that came to pass – and here were the greatest psephological minds in the country predicting the Nationalists would manage it with room to spare.
Every time I checked my phone, another set of jokes about me having to look out the goose fat favoured by cross-channel swimmers had found its way to the internet.
However, the prediction still didn’t feel right. I spoke to colleagues in Labour and the Lib Dems who also questioned the numbers.
We started getting reports in from observers at the counts and the suggestion that we were only in the running for two seats – as the model predicted – was wide of the mark.
While we’d all seen Scottish Labour’s collapse a mile off and agreed they were only ever likely to hold one seat out of the seven they had entered the
Election with, the idea that the Lib Dems would lose a seat such as Orkney and Shetland, which they had held for all but 15 of the last 150 years, was madness.
I spoke to a couple of the number crunchers behind the poll, who pulled the results up on their screen and pointed to the column which showed the probability they’d calculated some of the disputed seats for at 99 per cent and others at 100 per cent.
The other thing about election nights is that once the dam bursts and the first returns come in, the trickle quickly turns into a flood.
Soon you don’t have to talk about projected results as you have the real ones being declared in quick succession. Our first win was on the board at 3am – Douglas Ross returning Moray. Two hours later, we had five more, with several high-profile casualties in between.
Good, hard-working and committed members of Parliament losing their jobs a fortnight before Christmas. I love politics but it can be brutal.
As predicted, Labour returned to their pre-2017 tally of one seat, having lost everything other than their citadel of Edinburgh South.
For the Lib Dems, it was a bittersweet night – gaining Menzies Campbell’s old seat of North East Fife but also taking the biggest casualty of the night – their UK party leader, Jo Swinson, being defenestrated in East Dunbartonshire by just 149 votes. While the
SNP fell well short of the predicted 55 seats (and shy of 50, saving me from the chilly depths of Loch Ness) there is no denying this was a good result for Nicola Sturgeon and her party.
Her vote share went up and she returned more seats. Inevitably, her demands for another independence referendum started before the last seat was counted – with the result cited as justification.
But in this Election, Ms Sturgeon’s strategy was to court Labour and Lib Dem voters by playing down separation and talking up Europe.
The Labour collapse that happened right across the UK was well-heralded in Scotland.
The only question was to whom those voters would shift their support. The general consensus was that while some would go SNP to stop Brexit, a chunk would use a pro-Union vote tactically for the Conservatives in seats where they could stop the SNP, while yet more would lodge their ballot for the Lib Dems as both a pro-Europe and pro-UK option.
Nicola Sturgeon’s pitch to these disaffected Labour voters was explicit. She implored them to lend her their votes as the only way to ‘stop Brexit’ and ‘lock Boris out of Downing Street’.
As is the current political vogue, she plastered her main message on the side of a bus.
Her candidates went further still, removing any reference to independence from their campaign literature. Dave Doogan in Angus explained that his activists were ‘painstakingly and very respectfully speaking to Labour voters about how I personally respect their decision’ on independence.
Veteran Perth and North Perthshire MP, Pete Wishart, said: ‘Stopping the Johnson Tories is the most important thing.’
Amanda Burgauer, SNP candidate in Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, tweeted: ‘I pledge I will not take your vote as pro-Indy.’
Meanwhile, the new MP for Gordon, Richard Thomson, promised: ‘A vote for me in this Election will be a vote to stop Brexit... what it absolutely is not is a vote for Scottish independence and I will never, ever, try and claim it as such.’
In the event, those voting SNP neither locked Boris Johnson out of Downing Street nor stopped Brexit.
But that is no longer their purpose, if it ever was. Ms Sturgeon has now claimed each and every vote as a personal mandate for independence, despite promising they would not be used to that end.
Indeed, the SNP has never come out of an electoral event – even when it lost, such as the referendum in 2014, or gone backwards, as it did when it lost its majority in the 2016 Holyrood elections – without renewing calls for separation.
BOTH Scottish Conservative leader Jackson Carlaw and Prime Minister Boris Johnson reflected Ms Sturgeon’s evergreen response by restating their commitment to the pledge they gave voters – that no second independence referendum would be forthcoming.
They would hold Ms Sturgeon to the binding agreement she signed between the Scottish Government and the UK Government that said she would respect the result of the independence referendum in 2014.
Ms Sturgeon’s Election return of 45 per cent of the vote – a portion of which was gained on a promise it would never be used as a proxy for independence – is enough to give her a grievance, but not take her any further forward than five years ago.
There is space therefore for the Prime Minister to ensure the rhetoric of his One Nation vision is matched by reality. He should take it. Ensuring promises over Brexit to Scotland’s fishing industry are kept and support for farmers honoured is a good start.
Making sure Scotland’s immigration needs – such as four-year student visas and raising the quota for seasonal workers – would help.
Making a point of allocating extra infrastructure and research spending north of the Border would also be welcome – but what would really settle nerves is using his new-found majority to tack to the centre and return to the liberal, internationalist outlook Mr Johnson exhibited as London mayor.
The size of the Prime Minister’s majority gives him a freedom denied his predecessors.
However, that freedom comes with the responsibility to reach out to Scotland, despite SNP attacks and grievance, to ensure no part of the United Kingdom feels left behind during his premiership.