When the count was suspended somewhere between 4:00am and 5:00am on Friday morning we came home and Jayne knocked up some bacon and eggs. We stayed up until the kids were up for school. It was Frankie’s last day and he was getting all dressed up in his new suit for the event, so Jayne wanted to stay awake long enough to see him looknig smart for a change.

I tried to stay up until all 3 had gone off to school, and sat up in the kitchen watching the news, but I gave up at about 7:30 and went to bed. That was just in time for me to be dropping off as the dustmen arrived outside. We were up at 11 so that we could get to the school for Frankie’s do before going to the count.

Unfortunately the school displayed their usual contempt for promptness and the start was delayed. They really must think that all parents have nothing to do except hang around the school whenever they are asked to. It was approaching 12 and we had not even been let in for something which was supposed to start at 11:45 so I went off to the count and left Jayne there with the digital camera.

At the count everything went quite smoothly. The tellers were obviously a lot more refreshed than they were 8 hours earlier. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that our returning officer did not make the decision that the Harlow one did – he postponed the recount as well, and for the same reasons, but he set the restart at 10:00 Saturday instead of 12:00 Friday.

During the second recount the Tories were scrutinising every paper, looking for any which did not have the official mark on them. Some papers do manage to slip through which the polling station staff either forget to punch or do not punch properly. Really this is the sort of thing which should be looked for (and found) during the initial verification stage so we thought it was a bit fussy looking for them on the second recount. They did find a few, but at the same time they found bundles of our votes which had 51 votes in. It all evened out, and actually worked in our favour a bit as we ended the second recount with a lead increased from 32 to 35.

You might have thought this was enough, but the Tories insisted on yet another recount, which pissed us off a bit. In fact we decided that this time round we would check every Tory paper for the official mark, and found a few which had the mark missing. Eventually the count was finished for the 4th time and our lead had increased from 35 to 37 and Henry conceded defeat. As you can imagine we were all extremely relieved that it was over and ecstatic that we had won.

It was a bit of an anti-climax after that to have to sit through the county council count. Laura and her family were OK, they could go off and celebrate (after doing a few TV and press interviews), but we wanted to see how the Broadfield vote went and how Jayne did in Pound Hill.

The counting seemed to go on for ever. A few of the county divisions are multi-seat ones and they take longer to count as there are a lot of ‘split papers’ – where people did not cast two votes for the same party, or only cast one vote. The Broadfield vote was quite easy – only one seat – and got finished quite quickly. We won that by 1800 to 1200 on a decent turnout. The Pound Hill one took ages as its a much larger area with more voters and a higher turnout.

As expected, the Tories won easily, but Jayne did pick up 2307 votes, which is very respectable. As soon as that result was announced, at about 5:15pm we had to dash off and pick up my cat from the vets.

After we got home, we popped into Laura’s house to see what was going on, and joined them in a few glasses of champagne while we watched the news and cheered and booed as appropriate. I think we all realise that this years result is very significant for the town. With such a small majority the next election is going to be of much more interest nationally than this one was. Next time round we will get the sort of attention Dorset South got this time round. While its nice to win big, even a 37 majority is a win, and having got such a close result we are now hoping that Harlow is not so close. I think it would be worse to have the 2nd smallest majority in the country.

Friday evening I fully intended to write this entry, but everything caught up with me and I fell asleep on the sofa watching Sky News at about 10pm, only waking up at 5:30am to crawl upstairs to bed.

Its a real shame to see our majority here reduced so much, but I think this is really rock bottom and it can only go up from here. Next time we will not have the Iraq war, the hospital and the PM’s personal unpopularity to contend with. We may have had the largest Tory to Labour swing in the country but we also had a higher turnout than the national average for a change. Next time round, our higher profile will mean a lot more help from the national party and other neighbouring parties. We may even get a lot more outside help for our local elections next year, and that can only be good for us.