There seems to have been several of these fuck-ups. The Newcastle-under-Lyme result isn't in yet but it's a marginal and at least 50 voters have turned up with voter registration cards who aren't on the lists. Same in Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport where the council not only screwed up the voting lists but also postal votes and the current Tory majority is 523.

I'm always on tenterhooks about these things and I can't trust myself to believe good news. I won't relax until the results are all in.

That said, I have my fingers crossed for Hastings just along the coast from me where my son lives. It's the Home Secretary's constituency and she appears to have called for a recount - which means she must have lost the first count. Apparently the local Labour party are very happy which suggests we aren't looking at 1 or 2 votes difference.

She held, but only by 346. That would have been a huge loss.

Our constituency held as Tory, but by about 365 votes.

I was very very surprised this morning!

Well, I didn't see that one coming!

Yes, I think the messages coming out of the count were wrong. I think the recount was probably ordered by the returning officer because the numbers were so close. I suspect Rudd was ahead on the first count. Very disappointing.

Commiserations. 

I think it's fairly clear that Labour managed to get out loads of new and infrequent voters and attracted back its share of UKIP voters (I imagine these are working-class voters who see Labour as their natural home in spite of their actual views). Unfortunately many Scottish/UKIP/Stupid voters swung back to the Tories as well with the result being a more two-party kind of election across the UK than we've been used to in the last few years.

I hope that the Labour euphoria at getting a better-than-expected result doesn't get out of hand. When these supposed new voters find that in spite of making the effort to leave the house, walk down the road, and vote, we aren't going to get an end to austerity, nationalised railways, a publicly owned utility service alongside the private ones, reinvestment in housing and healthcare, etc. and that quite to the contrary, Theresa May will press ahead with her agenda, quietly dropping the difficult bits, will they stay energised of drop off to sleep again?

The worst possible outcome is the prospect of May resigning and Boris Johnson taking over. 

I don't see May resigning, and I don't see Johnson being made PM if she does, in the wake of his serial, public idiocies.

The worst outcome I can see is fumbling the Brexit negotiations by whichever lame duck PM, while a polarized UK is riven by political infighting, further terrorist acts inciting a rightward drift (which amazingly did not happen in the election, so who knows).

Also: this election (and the US') shows that the influence of the news media is rapidly waning in the facebook era.

You may be right about Johnson - he certainly has deadly enemies within the Tory party. On the other hand I'm reminded of simple facts such as his relatively comfortable win as London Mayor, a post for which he was patently unsuited, his appointment as Head of Foreign and Commonwealth, and his continuing public popularity.

I can see that he's a posh-boy bully and thug masquerading as a well-meaning eccentric. Most people I know can see it as well. But the H L Mencken effect is well and truly working in his favour as it did, albeit in different circumstances for Rob Ford who continued to win landslide victories in spite of his prodigious drug and alcohol habit and numerous public indiscretions. I don't think we can rely on ill-health saving us from Boris.

Once upon a time, a public disgrace such as discussing assaulting a journalist with a friend, or being caught falsifying information for news stories, or using racist language, would merit a resignation and retirement from public life. Today Johnson holds a major public office. And he's not alone. Liam Fox, for example, is International Trade Minister in spite of being up to his neck in the expenses scandal (he was the single highest claimant while also regularly condemning the 'waste' of public money on the poor and sick). Fox also had to resign as Secretary of State for Defence when it emerged that he allowed a friend, uncleared or subject to any security vetting, who had no job with the MOD or any branch of government or public service, to simply attend top secret defence meetings and even to fly abroad for similar meetings at public expense. No doubt this helped his friend's lobbying business greatly. I worked for the Ministry of Defence many years ago. I suspect I would have spent some time in one of Her Majesty's fine prisons had I tried anything similar.

So I can't rely on Boris being out of the picture.

 

How are party leaders selected: straight up party membership vote, MP's, or convention delegates chosen by backroom boys?

Different rules for each party. I think this is right...

The Conservatives have rounds of voting between MPs to shortlist the 2 MPs to go to the vote of the party members. MPs nominate themselves for leadership. In the case of Theresa May, she was in the final 2 but her opponent withdrew so May won by default.

For Labour, MPs nominate themselves for the leadership contest but they need votes of sitting Labour MPs to appear on the ballot. Once they reach the threshold they are one of the nominated. Then the vote goes to the MPs, party members and unions. Can't remember the proportions of which groups hold more sway.

The DUP sounds like a real piece of work.

What he said. The Labour process is one member or affiliate, one vote. Members are - well - people who have joined the party and are up to date with fees. Affiliates are a) members of a Trade Union that is affiliated with the Labour Party and pays the affiliation fee b) registered supported of the party who have paid the one-off supporter fee.

Corbyn first stood for the leadership under a National Executive Committee controlled by right wing Labour MPs who were astonished when he won. They immediately instigated both overt and covert schemes to undermine him, briefing the press with misinformation about him, staged press interviews, staged resignations from committees and shadow govt. posts, simple rumour spreading - anything and everything they could to damage his reputation. Finally he was challenged for the leadership after less than 12 months. The opposition campaign was marked by a wide range of dirty tricks. The covert relationship with the press continued and MPs such as Stephen Kinnock, Chuka Umuna, Hilary Benn and several others felt free to give interviews where they openly rubbished Corbyn's ability and authority and issued all kinds of threats about not working with him. He and his supporters were characterised as bullying left-wing thugs (which judging by the mild, rather innoffensive, rather ordinary people I met - oh, and me of course, didn't quite ring true). Members who joined within 6 months of the election were told they couldn't vote even though voting was expressly offered during sign up. Many members who expressed support for Jeremy Corbyn were actually expelled from the party (unbelievable but true). People registering as supporters had their applications declined usually for spurious reasons and the NEC raised the fee from £3 to £25. He won again, this time increasing his majority to >60%.

I've missed so much: the attempt to exclude him from the ballot paper when he was challenged for the leadership (wasting a fortune in High Court), the meeting to exclude 'new' members where an emergency motion was raised and voted on just after Corbyn had left the room - it goes on and on like a lunatic conspiracy story so wild that if you put it in a novel the publisher would throw it back at you as ridiculously far-fetched.

And these were the people on his side - the Labour Party. He was the leader, He had a huge majority. He had to put up with this before he even began to fight his corner with the opposition. That makes what he managed in this election even more astonishing.

Edit: and yes, the DUP are charming.

You've got to wonder if he'd have won a majority if it weren't for all the back-stabbing party hacks. Of course May probably wouldn't have called the election if she hadn't thought him extremely weak in the first place.

I would love to think that was the plan all along... There's a semi-alternative-universe script somewhere depicting the Labour infighting, and when the door closes it's all slapped backs and passing the teapot on the left side.

I'm still not ruling out the possibility of the Tories putting May in charge as the cleanest way to not have to deal with leaving the EU, but she's so fucking incompetent she can't even lose an election properly.

I think she's trying to paint a gloss of noble intent over her hubris by taking on the role of scapegoat.  She will take the approaching pain of Brexit upon her shoulder pads and head out into the wilderness, hopefully (in her terms) reducing the opprobrium hurled at the Tories.

The present lot seems pretty incompetent generally so I tend to favour the balls-up theories rather than the conspiracy ones.

As for conspiracies in Labour, the anti-Corbyn brigade were so clumsy about them that they hardly counted as secret. Having lived through the period when Michael Foot led the Labour party, I wasn't really surprised, except perhaps by the ferocity of the attacks on Corbyn and by the way that all sides piled in to help. Foot was a very different man from Corbyn and those were very different times. There was no social media to help Foot and he came across as an awkward public speaker, both in delivery and appearance. Although he was about the same age as Corbyn is now, he appeared far older. Clothes hung from his frame and his penchant for duffel-coats and donkey-jackets was a godsend for the press. Curiously, the fact that the content of his speeches was often erudite and beautifully argued - he was a superb writer - often counted against him as well. He was condemned as an intellectual, out of touch with reality. 

The Labour party is no different from any of the main UK parties in that it encompasses a wide range of views and spans so many political standpoints that there are often grey areas. It isn't as weird as the GOP or the Democrats in the US where you could question somebody, place them to the left of the Democrats, and then find out they are Republicans - and the other way round - but there are certainly some who could easily find a place in the Tory party, and those who would be comfortable in the UK Socialist party. In fact, what many people don't realise because it is never reported, is that when the Labour party is referred to, the designation is a shorthand for two different but distinct parties: the Labour party and the Co-operative party. The Co-operative party was founded in 1917 but since an electoral pact 10 years later, it works exclusively with and under shared banners with the Labour party in the UK. Nevertheless, it is a distinct party with its own constitution, rules, General Secretary, Chair etc. There are currently 28 Co-op MPs, although some are also members of the Labour party, which means that it's the 4th largest party in Parliament. Politically it is more centre-left than socialist and does not share the historical links to Fabianism or Marxism that Labour has. 

The connection between the Co-op MPs and an anti-Corbyn position is not so clear. Obviously there are no official lists of for and against, and the no-confidence vote before the last leadership election was a secret ballot. Nevertheless, these lists exist. Only 2 of the Co-op MPs supported Corbyn in the vote (there were 26 Co-op MPs then, with 2 elected since: one a supporter, one probably not). In spite of this, the well-know table of those clearly opposed to Corbyn only features 5 Co-op names. Had Ed Balls remained an MP he would probably be there as well. His wife, Yvette Cooper is not a Co-op member even though she is clearly not pro-Corbyn.

The truth is that JC has the pleasure of attracting criticism from across the party, or parties. Things will blur a bit now as the detractors rush to apologise for their 'little bit of naughtiness' and state how wrong they were to ever doubt him. But others will not budge. Hilary Benn will continue with his sad little rebellion against the politics of his father. Stephen Kinnock and Chuka Umunna will conspire - badly - because they believe they are entitled to run the party and no doubt Chris Leslie will continue to brief the press against Corbyn and the press will happily splash these views across their pages.