The exit poll has ruined election night (but not like it did for Jeremy)

I know it's ten days after the event but Christmas has intervened. A hopeful sign of normal life butting in again after a protracted political nightmare? For most people the mood has lightened and folk have stopped talking about the B word.

It won't surprise some readers to know that I love general election nights. Yes, I'm interested in politics, but I don't watch much tv coverage of politics other than the news and sometimes Question Time. I would have been interested in the Andrew Neil interviews - he's the only good interviewer around at the moment for me - but I didn't make the time even for his one to ones and I thought it was wrong of him to pillory Boris Johnson for not appearing. It smacked of BBC entitlement to me.

But the election results.....for me it's a wonderful overload of numbers - results, statistics, swings - and histograms,  political maps....oooh lovely. Just like poring over Wisden as a teenage cricket fan. (Yes, of course I did. In the days when we had libraries). And there's that glorious moment when the exit poll is revealed, followed by all those talking heads saying "let's wait till we have some actual results". With, sometimes, wise old politicians making a complete tit of themselves, like Paddy Ashdown saying in 2015 that he'd eat his hat if the exit poll was right. (Actually, it wasn't right in the overall outcome but it was in predicting that his party would lose most of its seats).

However, the exit poll has now ruined election night for me.

In recent years I've been dismayed by the joint exit poll. Firstly that it's done jointly by the Beeb, ITV and Sky, which spoils the fun of three times as many exit poll numbers and seeing who got the best prediction. To be fair, when the polls were hoodwinked by those "shy Tories" in the past they realised they just had to have a bigger sample. Everyday political polls use a sample size of about 1000 which gives an error band of plus or minus 3 percentage points at 95% confidence. So if you had one party on 40 points and another on 34 there's still a small chance that they are actually neck and neck. So the one off polls, while normally fairly accurate, can sometimes be misleading. Which is why a "poll of polls" chart often tells you more. And why exit polls in the past were unreliable. Also the statisticians assume  a homogeneous population so regional or other differences could lead to errors. There are always regional variations in opinion, though what matters is the change from the previous election. And this time we had the wonderful uncertainty (well, not that wonderful while we thought there was any risk of PM Corbyn) of Brexit and switches in traditional voting patterns, including tactical voting.

To get much more confidence in the prediction you need a far bigger sample. Four times the size roughly halves the uncertainty to 1.5%. To get 99% confidence with plus or minus one percentage point you need a sample of over 16,000. Interestingly, once you have a population size of over 20,000 it doesn't make much difference to the sample size you need. So for that accuracy you'd need to sample over 16,000 whether your population was 50,000 or 50 million. Which is why the TV channels work together, otherwise it's too expensive.

But they still got it wrong in 2015, failing to call a Tory majority.  Techniques were refined, particularly on how the seats are predicted. The 2017 and 2019 exit polls, while not being right in detail, got the direction and scale of the overall result pretty close.

The exit poll started to ruin my election night in 2015 because they stopped showing the share of the vote and went straight to the predicted number of seats. Why did that bother me? Because I like to test my own feel for the result. In 1992 the exit poll got it totally wrong by calling a hung Parliament when John Major actually got a majority of 21. Mrs H and I had been out for dinner and got back to relieve the babysitter just before 10pm. I hurriedly switched on the TV in time for the bongs of News at Ten. "HUNG PARLIAMENT" they predicted. And then they showed the share of the vote. "If that's right" I said to my other half "we can go to bed because the Tories have won". It just seemed obvious to me that was the implication of the vote share. I sat up till the Basildon declaration proved my feel was right.

I've often wondered why the people in charge of that exit poll didn't share that feeling. Most probably they did, but didn't dare fudge the results. If it had been me, I'd like to think I'd have instructed them to show "Narrow Tory majority or hung parliament". If they'd done that they couldn't really have been wrong, after all.

But since 2015 they don't show the vote share. Three elections in a row I've been shouting at the TV "show us the vote share prediction". Then I can decide for myself if they've got it right. Once they finally showed the predicted vote share this time, some hours into the broadcast, it was obvious the Tory majority would be large. But by then results were already confirming it. If you'd told me it was Con 44%, Lab 32% the detail was pretty obvious after all.

So their failure to show the vote share combined with the accuracy they now seem to be getting, has spoiled my fun. It's a bit like watching the football knowing the pundits' prediction is bound to come to pass. Unlike Basildon in 1992, which made the pundits say "hang on...." this time Blyth Valley just confirmed the exit poll's veracity. It didn't stop me staying up till 2.45am mind. There was still some entertainment to be had. John McDonnell sounding as measured and reasonable as ever straight after 10pm and avoiding doing a Paddy Pantsdown. I respected his manner in defeat but it reminded me why I always felt he was so dangerous. (Was? Still is, as his like has their hands firmly on Labour's tiller). There was a super shouting match between Alan Johnson and the scary John Lansman across the studio. The big difference between these chaps is that Johnson is a decent man, even if he's wrong on most things, whereas Lansman is wrong on everything. And there was Alistair Campbell pointing out that only Tony Blair has won a decent majority for Labour in the last 50 years. Though John Smith would surely have also won handsomely in 1997 had he lived.

I shed no tears for Corbyn of course. A man fortunately too limited to be as dangerous as the opinions he holds. The electorate saw through the "kinder politics", the "many not the few" and the unbelievable promises. They saw someone who has very different values from the majority of British people.A number of writers have pointed out the fundamental thing in common between the electorate's stance on Brexit and on Corbyn: patriotism. Many leavers in that collapsed red wall were always wary of European federalism and ever greater union was not what they wanted. But they also, as Labour MP Pat McFadden said, saw a Labour leader unfit to lead, surrounded by people who believe the wrong side won the cold war and keen to explain away the crimes of the country's enemies as being our own fault. They had reservations about Johnson but his namesake Luke Johnson summed it up when he said "(Boris) Johnson is hardly perfect, but he is intelligent, optimistic, energetic and decisive. Corbyn is a tired Marxist who befriends terrorists and is surrounded by dangerous anti-Semites, quasi-communists and fools". I would add that, when he gets shouty, he sounds like a dalek and so comes across as unthinking and unfeeling. Which is what Marxists are actually like of course.

Many have argued that the electorate, in voting "Leave" didn't vote to make themselves poorer. (This is a canard I will return to). But they decided identity trumped the risk of being better off in the future but not by quite so much. Their reservations about immigration weren't racist but, in the less affluent areas, were driven by an intuitive understanding that low earning immigrants were holding down wages and adding impetus to the multi-cultural agenda that leaves many uneasy that we are losing our Britishness. These are valid, not racist, opinions whether you agree with them or not.

Johnson now has the opportunity to lay to rest once and for all the the charge that his is a right wing Tory party - a charge that has always seemed ludicrous to me. Brexit is not a right-left issue and the rest of the Johnson platform is very one nation conservatism.  Though the Guardian has pooh poohed the idea that the Tory party will be fundamentally changed by its influx of new, younger, more northern and yes more gay MPs it must have some effect. The state school, NHS oriented and everyday background of  the new recruits was obvious on election night and that back story has only got stronger. That said, the full name of South Dorset's new MP Richard Drax is really Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle Drax. But he didn't go to Eton. Though I'm not entirely sure that the fact none of the new Tory MPs went to Eton is necessarily a good thing.

Pundits have pointed out that Johnson's Get Brexit Done only increased the Tory vote by 0.3 million while May's Strong and Stable put on 2.3 million. But the increase of 1.2% to 43.6% made it the largest share of the vote for the Tories since Ted Heath in 1970. The key thing was that, by creating the situation in which he could turf out the Gaukeward squad, Johnson has united the Tories for the first time since Thatcher's heyday. Given their woes over Europe for the best part of 30 years this is not to be underestimated. And he benefited from a vote split between Labour and Lib Dem very like that which created Maggie's large majorities. The main difference between Johnson and May was that Johnson offered hope (and entertainment). But he also benefitted from the fact that we'd lived through 2 years of purgatory. Woyld tge redult have been the same if the Tories had gone for Johnson, not May, after Cameron? Maybe.

However, we are left with no party of fiscal probity. I just hope the world economy doesn't falter as we could do without heading into a financial crisis with debt going up quickly. Johnson will need luck on his side.

Meanwhile the LibDems reaped what they sowed by hanging their whole body, not just their hat, on total opposition to Brexit, which seemed anti-democratic to so many. It is legitimate to hold the view that we are better off in the EU but it didn't feel right to stridently insist on it against the votes of 17.4 million people. Together with the hubris of  Jo Swinson with her insistence that she could be PM, I'm sure this limited the LibDem increase in vote share to a point where they were never going to make an impact. Nevertheless, I was saddened that she lost her seat and disgusted by Nicola Sturgeon's reaction. But Swinson's defeat leaves the LibDems in a difficult position - maybe even the "existential crisis" I saw in one headline.

And Nigel Farage? His place in history is now secure despite leading two different parties which both failed to win a single seat in a general election. An absolutely remarkable achievement.... Hopefully we will see less of him in future, though I expect he'll pop up again as 2020 wends it's way towards a close and the last deal or no-deal cliff edge. On that score, Johnson must resist the EU's preposterous attempt to impose sequencing on the trade negotiation after it caused so much trouble on the withdrawal agreement. (Apparently they want to sort fishing and a few other things first. I'm still not buying another BMW till this is sorted Angela). You know my prescription - walk away early if they insist on prejudicing the negotiation from the start, giving time to come back and reach agreement on mutually acceptable terms.

The only party besides the Tories to do well was the SNP. I think Johnson is right to resist their calls for a referendum for now.  A 45% vote share against the unionist parties isn't a clear mandate for independence. If she gets nowhere I wonder if Nicola Sturgeon will dare to have a referendum about having a referendum  - if she legally can. But if not don't jail her like the Spanish did with the Catalans. Boris should deliver Brexit and let people see whether it's working for them before anyone, including the Scots, tries to block or subvert it or take their ball away.

The Scottish position is fraught but it's the future of Labour that probably matters most to England and Wales. Corbyn has stayed on solely to ensure that his successor is picked using the same rigged rules that got him there. His supporters, like Richard Burgon - sorely over-exposed in this campaign - show absolutely no contrition, though the claim that they won the argument and their manifesto was popular did make me smile. What would being unpopular look like in a general election result? Labour have the chance to regroup but probably won't be able to take it this time, as the involvement of Ed Miliband in their inquisition demonstrates. After all, Labour's crisis is his fault as he set the rules under which Corbyn got in. They'll go for a younger, probably female leader who may well prove to be as  unready for the job as Jo Swinson was. All governments need a reasonable quality opposition to keep them on their toes so Labour's woes aren't helpful but worse, in the longer term, is the lack of an electable alternative.

The scale of the Tories triumph is that both Labour and the LibDems are in deep disarray if not crisis.Suddenly we've stopped hearing that, unless they can appeal to the young, the Tories are dead. Youth fell for Corbyn in 2017 but younger people saw right through him this time as the crossover age at which people are more likely to vote Tory fell from 47 to 39.

A Happy Christmas to all my readers. I wish you peace and prosperity in the new year confident that, for every man (and woman) jack of you, you will be better off under Johnson than you would have been under Corbyn.