Henry Zeffman

Yes, I mean, you've got a rolling election period for election nerds, and I suspect there's one or two of them in this room.

I don't think we're alone, Henry.

So there's the overnight results that will happen Thursday into Friday, but that's a relatively small proportion overall.

The real election night, in the way that we think of it in a general election, where all of the action comes overnight, the real election night is actually during the day on Friday.

So you can experience the election night having actually gone to bed.

LAUGHTER

If you so choose.

You could do the whole hog and stay up all night and then all day and then all of Friday night and into Saturday, which is probably not wise.

But Friday will be the day of rolling results.

We'll wake up with a sense on the Friday morning, in England in particular,

how well or poorly the parties have done, at least in the places that are counting overnight.

But there'll be a rolling sense of results during the day on Friday, and in particular Wales and Scotland, as well as English local authorities, which will start painting a picture.

And then the political leaders will be reacting in real time to those results as they...

as they come, and then into the weekend and more analysis and all the rest of it, but MPs won't be obliged to be back at Westminster for a couple of days after that.

Of course, that doesn't stop plotting, and of course, lots of MPs and councillors and former councillors and former MSPs and et cetera, et cetera,

will have loads of encounters with microphones when they've not had much sleep, when they're feeling fraught and anxious, or in contrast, full of celebration and excitement for those who are winning.

And that's when you often get as close to the kind of authentic

expression of what they really feel in front of the cameras because it's moments of triumph and disaster and everything in between that are captured on that are captured on camera that's the joy of the joy of our democratic process isn't it right anyone else got a question if you'd like to put your hands up and we can get a microphone to you there we go somebody at the back there yeah uh changing the subject a little bit um what can um the conservatives do to ever become relevant again

And in the end, in the course of this Parliament, unless there was a substantial shift in sentiment towards the Conservatives and reform, there'll be a big crunching question that the Conservatives will face, either before or after the general election, which is, what is their bottom line view on reform?

and you hear different things privately about how the party should confront a situation where both of them are polling relatively well, and in the current context, that means upper teens or lower 20s, and reform are currently higher than that.