Well the time difference is finally catching up to me. So I should probably sign off. So what have we learned tonight?

Well as of this moment the Labour party has surpassed expectations and gained 20 additional seats, but looks like they will still fall well short of a majority. The Liberal Democrats have gained four and the SNP has come down from its stratospheric results of 2015 to lose 14. This still leaves them as by far the largest party in Scotland, and I would view as more of a correction than anything else. That vote was unsustainable. But the big story is that, at time of writing, the Conservatives were down 9 seats. That puts them squarely into minority government territory, and for my money dooms May’s short-lived premiership. More interestingly they are perilously close to losing enough seats that even a deal with their natural ideological allies the Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland  wouldn’t be enough to reach a majority, even assuming such a deal was feasible. If more of the seats yet to be declared in England turn red, which seems distinctly possible, all bets are off and we are in for quite a spectacle of bloodletting, recrimination and uncertainty.

 

3:39 AM: Continuing the long history of UKIP leaders failing to win parliamentary seats Paul Nuttall has come up short in Boston and Skegness.

3:15 AM: Not to harp on the results of the Lib Dems, but their intense campaigning in the South-West has paid off with the party gaining Bath from the Conservatives.

2:57 AM: The electorate giveth and the electorate taketh away. On the back of the loss of Sheffield Hallam  Vince Cable has  retaken the London seat of Twickenham for the Lib Dems.

2:48 AM: Nick Clegg, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, has lost his seat of Sheffield Hallam to Labour. The Lib Dems were already crushed at the last election, decades of careful progress undone in 3 years. This was meant to be the start of their fight-back to relevance. Now it looks like the electorate is delivering them yet another rebuke.

2:35 AM: The BBC has updated its forecast, revising down their expectations of Labour performance but still predicting the tories will lose their majority.

2:30 AM: The SNP is getting yet more bad news, with their leader in Westminster losing his seat of Moray as well as two others, bringing their total to the night so far to -5. The strong Tory showing north of the border means that their net total losses are being held at 1 now, their Scottish performance compensating for losses in England. But the relatively small number of seats in Scotland means that even if their numbers there hold up that is not sustainable, especially as Labour also appears to be making something of a comeback there.

 

2:15 AM: Results are in for Ealing Central, and its not good for the Blue team. This was a seat where the Tories hoped to dislodge the sitting Labour MP and…they didn’t. In fact they lost ground. 8 points in fact, with the Labour candidate increasing her majority to 15% at the expense of the Tories and minor parties.

2:05AM: Labour has taken two more scalps, Shipley and Battersea, both exactly the sort of places May was hoping her working-class Tory message would resonate and gain her ground. Instead Labour appears to be consolidating support and building on its vote. The swing is, however, still fairly moderate. We are now in the realms of a lost Tory majority, but not  a Labour government. The days of a strengthened mandate for May are gone. Leadership speculation begins to bubble. One can almost picture Boris Johnson practicing his attack lines in front of the mirror in a greenroom somewhere…

1:55 AM: The Tories have gained a seat in Scotland for the SNP in the constituency of Angus. Their performance here was always going to be one of the more interesting parts of the evening. Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson caused quite a stir in the last Scottish election by leading her party out of the doldrums and back to relevance. That coupled with the performance of the SNP in the post-indyref blitz of the last Westminster election almost certainly representing a high-water mark means there is nowhere really to go but down.

 

1:50 AM The first Labour gain from the Conservatives for the night in Vale of Clwyd. One of several promising seats for Labour. All talk of the swing being illusory can now be put away. This is important as at the beginning of the campaign there was a great deal of talk of Labour actually losing seats to the Tories. That looks like a very remote possibility now, and May will be under tremendous pressure from her party for what was widely perceived to be a weak campaign which is now costing them members.

1:42 AM(Its ok, I’m in New York. But lets use London time so as to keep things consistent with reporting) So far there are 22 seats for Labour, 11 for the Conservatives. Labour would need to secure 97 additional seats to win. Currently the only seat changing hands is Rutherglen & Hamilton West, moving from the SNP to Labour. If this is the start of a significant swing to Labour it could seriously upset the prevailing wisdom as far as electoral arithmetic goes, but the SNP majorities in some of the seats after the last wave are so large that it would require a lot of doing to overcome.

The first thing to note about this election is that nobody really knows what is going to happen. So perhaps its not such a bad thing that my predictions are absent, based as they would have been upon the output of the laughably ineffective British polling industry. Just to give you an idea, the final polls I looked at ranged from giving the contest to May and her Conservative Party by 12 points to predicting an upset Labour victory of 2 points. And the average error is about 4, so anyone who tells you they know what is happening because of some poll or other is having you on.

Having failed to finish my prediction post about the UK Election because of the tyranny of new employment I have decided to do a little live blog here and reconfigure that piece as a post-game analysis over the weekend. So, without further ado, Election 2016!