The UK Election: 10. What Happens on Election Day?

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Hello and welcome to Understand the UK Election, your essential guide to the general election. I'm Adam Fleming.

My day job is presenting the BBC's daily news podcast, Newscast, but I've been covering general elections for this organisation since 2005, meaning that this is my sixth UK general election as a professional observer.

Today, in our final episode, we're talking about what happens at the end of the campaign, what it's all been leading up to, polling day itself.

My guests here are BBC News presenter, Rita Chakrabarty, who will be following the results as they come live into the BBC One election studio. Hi, Rita.
Hello, Adam.

Have you been polishing up a big screen to stand next to? Oh, yes, I have. And there is a team of people polishing as we speak.
Yes. And two screens, Adam.
Two. Two.

One on the catwalk and one on the touch screen. And in terms of kind of filling your brain with facts, what's that process like? Well, it's a laborious and long process that I'm in the middle of.

I just read, read, and read again. Sometimes I copy it out, sometimes I type it out, and then I go back to it and I think, oh, no, I've forgotten that.

And eventually one hopes that on the night it's there enough.

Also, we keep talking about the boundary changes, which sounds like a very technical thing, but it means that constituencies are different and sometimes have different names from the ones that we learnt last time.

Absolutely. So, Sedgefield, for example, is no longer Sedgefield, but Newton Aycliffe.
Some of the constituencies have now got very long names because they've stuck different bits together.

And so that, you know, we don't get confused, we will know exactly what it is. So, we've got to get our heads around that.

And we've also got to get our heads around this idea of a notional majority, which is the result in this new constituency, had the vote taken place in 2019, i.e., had the same same number of votes for each party, worked in the same way.

I still haven't got it in the middle of the day.

It will be succinct on the nine. Okay, good, good, but there's still a little bit of time to rehearse.

Also getting his head around all of that is Henry Zeffman, BBC chief political correspondent, who will be hosting coverage on Five Live and Radio 4. Hello, Henry.
Hello.

I'm just wondering for you, psychologically, how you make the shift from like day-to-day blow-by-blow campaign to then getting the aerial view of the results. It's a different kind of skill, isn't it?

I think adrenaline is probably the succinct answer to that question.

Yeah, I mean, there is something profoundly different, isn't there, about being immersed in the granular detail of the campaign as it unfolds, which I am and I'm very much enjoying at the moment.

And then that moment at 10 p.m.

on the 4th of July, when suddenly all of that fades into the past and you're left with something much more impressionistic and national and general about what the country thinks and how the country wants to be governed.

But let's rewind to the start of polling day.

And Henry, it's a combination of law and BBC guidelines that means there's just no reporting of the campaign and certainly no opinion polls and certainly no broadcasting of how individual people have voted.

Exactly. You'll see some footage of the party leaders going to vote, grinning and smiling with their spouses and or their pets.
But through the day, it is this sort of...

pause in the sound and fury and havoc before it all resumes with bells on at 10 p.m. So the first thing we kind of see on the election night programme is the famous exit poll moment.

Just talk me through what the exit poll is. It is based on several hundred constituencies where we ask people to replicate the vote that they've just cast for whichever party it is.

And we use those votes to forecast what this means for seats for each party in the new parliament.

And I think the thing that people often don't know is that there is the particular skill of working out where in the country they should be conducting that exit poll.

And, you know, I'm always in awe of John Curtis and his team of cephalogical brain boxers, but they always seem to nail it. And people have been caught out by the exit poll.

I'm thinking famously of the late Paddy Ashdown, who, when presented with a collapse and the number of Lib Dem seats, said, If this number is true, I'll eat my hat.

I'm sure at five past 10, both of us on TV and Rita's case and radio and mine will be injecting a healthy dose of caveats into whatever that exit poll forecast, because you just don't know until those first results start trickling in.

And at that point, you do get to see whether the swing in those seats, usually seats in the northeast of England, replicates what the exit poll has suggested is happening nationwide.

Just can be quite jaw-dropping moments.

Like the Conservatives are on course for a majority of 80, which was in 2019, which people thought the electoral system couldn't deliver that sort of thing anymore.

Although 2017, I think, in elections that I've covered selfishly, I mean, I've only covered two, 2017 and 2019, 2017 was the real drawdropper.

It's 10 o'clock. The general election has been decided.
The result of the joint BBC, ITV and Sky exit poll conducted through the day.

It projects that the Conservatives will be the largest party in the new parliament, but on these figures, they will lose their overall majority in the Commons.

Theresa May had called a general election in order to strengthen her hand. real snap election.
Some people are calling this a snap election because it happened a few months earlier than it had to.

That was a proper snap election. That happened three years before it had to.
And she, the exit poll poll showed correctly, had lost her majority. I think that really stunned people.

The Prime Minister called this election because she wanted, as she put it, certainty and stability.

And this doesn't seem at this stage to look like certainty and stability.

Rita, I'm sure you've been to loads of election counts in your career. Just paint a picture of what it's like usually in a leisure centre.
In a leisure centre. They're always in leisure centre.

They're always in leisure centres and the lighting is very bad. Yes.
Well, it's exciting and it's tense, but there can be long periods of boredom as well because it depends on where you are.

You know, if you're the correspondent there, there's a certain amount of guesswork going on. You know, you're watching the votes piling up.
You're looking at who's smiling, who's sweating.

You do your live into the studio with the presenter saying, well, you know, it looks like it might be getting closer, but we're still not quite sure.

You try and convey the fact that this is democracy in action, if you like. It's a lot of people giving up their time to deliver the results.

And the parties do get a sense informally often of where things are going in that constituency, often for sort of mundane local reasons.

You know, they will know that the ballot boxes that have just arrived in a van outside are from a certain part of the constituency, and then they'll watch the piles piling up for a certain party.

And then, you know, sometimes they'll be able to say to you, oh, well, this part of the seat is looking actually less good for us than we thought or better for us than we thought.

And so actually, the sort of local campaigners are often often the best barometers sometimes even if they're not being candid as Rita says simply by looking at their faces.

Right let's talk about graphics and when people think of election night and graphics they think of the classic swingometer. Henry just explain to us the basics of what swing actually is.

Well it's a way of measuring the extent to which support has transferred from one party to another.

Almost always, and certainly at the national level, what we'll be talking about is swing between the Conservatives and Labour in whichever direction that goes.

Though in some constituencies it might be swing between the Scottish National Party and the Lib Dems or swing between Plyde and Labour or whatever.

And it's definitely possible that this election is going to shape up to have vast swings simply because for the Labour Party to get a majority of one, they need, I think, a bigger swing nationwide than Tony Blair achieved in 1997 when he overturned John Major's majority.

So a lot of people from both parties, both main parties, do expect this to be a volatile election. Some people think it's a more volatile electorate than usually.

And volatility means very large numbers on the swingometer. And the guru of the swingometer before Jeremy Vine took over was Peter Snow, who sent us this little voice note.

I think the most exciting moment of my life, really, has been standing there at a BBC election studio, knowing that all around me, shortly, a great firework display of graphics will appear, explaining how the election is working.

And of course, for me, the most exciting graphic of all is that good old springometer. Well, let me introduce our new BBC springometer for the 90s.
Now, can I have the pendulum, please? Here it comes.

Thank you very much. And I will never forget the moment in 1992 when we all thought,

all the polls suggested, and indeed the exit poll until the last moment suggested that Neil Killock was the largest party in the new parliament.

But then at the last moment, literally five minutes before we opened the programme, John Major, the exit poll, said, would just pip Neil Kinnock.

And the most exciting moment of the actual programme when the results came in was when the vital seat that Labour had to gain for Neil Kinnock to get the largest party, and that was the seat of Basildon.

What's it done to your swingometer, Peter? Yes, it's on, David. There it is.
There is the Labour swing there. It stayed blue.
It didn't go red. There was only a 1.5% swing in Basildon.

And so we knew that Kinnock would not make it. He wouldn't become the member of the largest party.
Loads of things I could ask you about there.

Rita, conveying the data, how will you be doing your bit? So we don't have a single swingometer, but what we do have is the swing in individual constituencies.

And we can compare the swing in two constituencies in the same area or in different areas. And we can do this for quite a few constituencies.

So what we don't have is Peter Snow's great big global figure, if you like. Rita, you've done a few of these all-nighters.
Henry, this is your first general election as a broadcaster.

Rita, any tips for snacking, stamina, napping, power napping? Well, I mean, there's no power napping. You're on the whole time, but...
No, there's no paranapping.

Lubrets, you know, in the four-minute bulletins, we all make a dash. I take far too much usually.

I take lots of dried fruit, dark chocolate, bananas, and I take them all home with me afterwards, really. I don't know how you get through any of it.
You know, you just go through on adrenaline.

It's excitement. You do fight sleep.
For me, it's about half past four, and then you get a second wind as you realise dawn is probably breaking outside.

But it is very exciting, and the results come thick and fast. I mean, anybody who sat up all night will know, you know, really about half past two, there's a great deal going on.

And we, by and large, know by the time we've come off the air. I mean, we're on the 5th of July until 8 a.m.
and we will know probably what the result is.

What I always miss is the actual moment of going to the palace because I am usually asleep by then and that's about 11, half 11, so I wake up to find it's all happened.

Well that brings us on to the next day and is there a kind of official choreography about how it works and how the next government is formed? No, it's the short answer to that question.

I think it's horses for courses. It depends how clean and clear and early the result is or isn't.

If either party has clearly won a majority as the sun is rising, you will see them at the palace fairly soon afterwards, I'd imagine, and then walking into Downing Street fairly soon after that, certainly on the 5th of July.

But they might make another speech first. In 2019, for example, Boris Johnson gave a speech at Conservative headquarters very early.
I think that was sort of 5 or 6 a.m.

before he went and did a more formal Downing Street speech, having been invited to form a government by the King, which is the formal thing.

In 1997, which a lot of people will be thinking of as a parallel, given Labour could enter government for the first time after a long stretch, as they they did in 1997.

Tony Blair went and famously celebrated at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank, you know, with party supporters before then walking up Downing Street with that sort of very choreographed group of people with union flags.

I just remember 2015 when I was doing a lot more kind of like shoelather political reporting than I do now.

In the space of an hour, Nick Clegg resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats, having lost loads of seats. Ed Miliband resigned as leader of the Labour Party, having not won enough seats.

And David Cameron arrived in Downing Street with a majority, which people thought was impossible or very unlikely. And that all happened in the space of about, yeah, an hour and 10 minutes.

Whereas the last shoe leather election I did was in 2010 when there was five days of coalition talks and you know we were all exhausted after a long campaign.

It went on and on and on and on and we'd be dashing from Downing Street to the Cabinet Office.

We'd see one set of politicians going in with another set and then suddenly it was the Conservatives were wooing the Lib Dems and then actually Labour were wooing the Lib Dems and I just remember dashing around like well like a sort of blue

bottomed insect if I brightly coloured

exactly

not knowing if I was coming or going

Rita thank you very much break a leg on the night thank you and Henry thanks to you too thank you

and you can follow the results and them live across BBC on TV with special programmes on BBC One in Scotland Northern Ireland and Wales as well as on Radio 5 Live and Radio 4 and across the BBC News website.

And that's it for this series. Thank you to all my guests and if you missed any previous episodes you can find the rest of Understand the UK election on BBC Sands.

And if you want to keep up with the campaign all the way up until Polling Day and beyond then why not listen to me on Newscast available also on BBC Sands. Bye.

What done for getting to the end of this podcast? My name is Amol Rajan and and I'm Nick Robbins. And together we host the Today podcast.
It's made by the same superb team that make this podcast.

And right now we're busy making lots of episodes all about the election. We thought you might fancy joining us every Monday, every Thursday to talk it through.

Yes, the Today podcast is our moment twice a week now to take a step back from the news and indeed from the Today programme and try to work out what is really going on.

So if you like podcasts, maybe you even listen to the Today programme each weekday morning and on a Saturday too, then give us a try.

It's called the Today Podcast and we are very much available on BBC Sounds where you really should subscribe. Bye.

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