Election results hour by hour: Never mind the politics – this was a night of unmissable edge-of-the-seat drama

The failure of pollsters made for a roller-coaster ride of unexpected shocks and ill-advised pledges, ashen faces, fixed smiles and far-fetched rhetoric, finds Cahal Milmo

A night that began in anticipation of a dead heat climaxed in Tory triumph (Getty Images)

Rarely has the electoral pendulum swung so giddily as it did in the 10 hours after the polling stations closed for the 2015 general election. A night that began in anticipation of a dead heat was a roller-coaster ride through a morphing British political landscape – climaxing in Tory triumph.

22.00

An exit poll is delivered to gasps of incredulity.

A survey of 20,000 voters conducted at polling stations on behalf of the BBC, ITV and Sky is revealed to the nation the moment voting stops and millions of Britons are settling down for a night of dips and democracy.

After weeks of predictions of deadlock, suddenly the pollsters put David Cameron within touching distance of Downing Street with 316 seats and Nicola Sturgeon at the head of a political stampede that would sweep the SNP to all but one of Scotland’s 59 seats. Such is the scale of the departure from the prepared script of coalition wrangling that no one can quite bring themself to believe it.

Ms Sturgeon takes to Twitter to advise “Huge caution”.

Amid spluttering, the Liberal Democrat campaign supremo Paddy Ashdown vows to “publicly eat my hat” if the prediction of just 10 seats is borne out while Labour’s Alastair Campbell offers to chow down on his kilt. They are, time will show, rash words.

Paddy Ashdown vows to eat his hat if predictions of a Lib Dem meltdown are accurate (BBC)

From a gantry in the BBC’s shiny election-night studio, the psephological soothsayer quietly cautions against dismissing its findings. Professor John Curtice, the architect of the survey, explains that his painstaking methodology represents “the sum of probabilities of seats for the parties”.

00.38

Once the blur of sixth formers sprinting to deliver the first results in Sunderland has faded, the first signs begin to emerge that Labour leader Ed Miliband is not heading for electoral nirvana after all.

In Swindon North, albeit a remote Labour target, the party’s candidate provides the night’s first visual metaphor by going missing from the podium as it is announced that a sizable 4.3 per cent swing in the wrong direction has handed the seat back to the Conservatives.

More disturbingly, within an hour it is announced that the bellwether seat of Nuneaton, requiring a modest 2.3 per cent swing for a Labour victory, has remained in Tory hands with a three-point shift in the opposite direction. As one pundit observes, the great vote of 2015 may have had its “Basildon moment”.

02.10

Some 270 miles north, the “Huge caution” urged by the Scottish Nationalist Party leader is rapidly being thrown to the wind by her predecessor. In the Borders town of Gordon, the antennae of Alex Salmond are twitching from the tremors of a political earthquake: “There’s going to be a Scottish lion roaring tonight, which no Westminster government can ignore.”

Ten minutes later, his tartan carnivore scores one of its biggest kills.

Mhairi Black, a 20-year-old politics student who had juggled campaigning with her third-year dissertation, steps up to the victor’s podium for Paisley and Renfrewshire South to thank her mum and dad – and expresses her hope that Douglas Alexander stays in front-line politics.

The 47-year-old architect of the Labour campaign found himself praised for his losing contribution by the youngest British MP since 1667. Ms Black adds: “People have woken up to the fact that Westminster has not been serving them and the Labour Party has not been serving them”

The arteries of Labour and Lib Dem support in Scotland have been opened and the SNP lion is far from sated.

02.49

It can be the small things which divine the political weather. After four hours of spluttering that the exit poll did not match its own intelligence, Labour HQ sent a text to journalists dismissing a Cameron return to No 10 as unlikely. Meanwhile, Jeremy Vine, the Beeb’s king of swing, reveals his virtual-reality swingometer is close to being unable to cope with the SNP’s triumphs.

Jeremy Vine in the CGI House of Commons (BBC)

If the message were not already clear for Labour, then the result from Warwickshire North left little room for doubt. Ed Miliband’s No 1 target – with a super-slim Tory majority of 54 – had returned a new Conservative MP with 2,973-vote cushion.

03.10

The rout of Labour in Scotland is all but complete as its leader Jim Murphy yields to the axe of a 24 per cent SNP swing in East Renfrewshire.

Within 20 minutes, Glasgow North East, the safest Scottish Labour seat of all, falls to the greatest swing of all – 39 per cent, the biggest ever in a UK general election. With commendable spirit, Mr Murphy delivers just about the only uplifting line available to him: “The fightback begins tomorrow morning.”

04.11

With the BBC urgently lining up yellow hexagons to place on the Scottish part of its pavement electoral map, it is clear that demand for orange ones has slumped and the Lib Dems are paying a heavy price for their junior role in the Coalition. Their evisceration begins with the departure of the man who had studiously stayed out of the 2010 cohabitation as Simon Hughes, the party’s one-time deputy leader, was beaten by Labour in Bermondsey.

It is followed by Conservative victories against a choked-up Vince Cable in Twickenham and an ashen-faced David Laws in Yeovil as the Tories take seat after seat in their one-time ally’s South-west heartland.

Danny Alexander, the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, will be later drummed out of Inverness by the SNP, admitting he has “no plan” for what to do next. In Sheffield Hallam, a funereal Nick Clegg hangs onto his seat in the early dawn to lament a “cruel night”.

04.32

The masochism is not restricted to the politicians. After 11 polls detected only minimal movement in the parties’ positions since March, Lord Ashcroft speaks on behalf of psephologists when he tweets that it hasn’t been “a great night for any of the pollsters”.

From his eyrie above David Dimbleby’s head, Prof Curtice notes that the “broad story of the exit poll is correct” but with admirable restraint he stops short of finding knives and forks for the trilby and sporran of Messrs Ashdown and Campbell. The former Lib Dem leader declares: “That is the very last time I will question a BBC exit poll.”

05.02

It is not, of course, all one-way traffic. In Wirral West, the Conservative employment minister Esther McVey is ejected as the sole Tory MP on Merseyside by a margin of 417 votes. Across the Pennines an hour later, a thunder-faced George Galloway is turned out of the Bradford West seat he snatched from Labour in 2012. The Respect leader is accused by the Labour victor and forced-marriage survivor Naz Shah of having “demeaned democracy” by personal attacks on her during the campaign.

For his part Mr Galloway is the second Scot of the night to take up the lion metaphor, albeit perplexingly, as he declares: “The hyena can bounce on the lion’s grave but it can never be a lion and in any case, I’m not in my grave.”

05.47

As Mr Cameron wins his Oxfordshire seat, he dons the garb of the “one-nation” Tory, at times kept under lock and key in his battle bus dressing-up box in recent weeks. He tweets: “One nation, one United Kingdom – that is how I hope to govern”. His counterpart is not given to such grandiloquence. Mr Miliband, in his Doncaster North declaration, apologises to his colleagues for a “very difficult and disappointing night”.

08.18

There is one final sting in the tail. An abiding image of the night will be the rictus grin of former shadow Chancellor Ed Balls as he loses his Morley and Outwood seat to Conservative Andrea Jenkyns by just 422 votes after a recount.

Some 275 miles to the south in Thanet South, the failure of Nigel Farage to double Ukip’s tally of MPs a couple of hours later, despite his party garnering four million votes, will spark a similar fixed smile of political defeat.