The view from the leisure centre balcony: as another by-election looms, see how election counts work from the press room

Hilary Scott reflects on Labour’s second by-election win in the early hours of February 16 and how the media coverage really works when you cast your vote

Election counts are a funny old job as a reporter. You know it’s going to be a very long night when a General Election is eventually called, ending with a ten minute adrenalin hit in the wee small hours – presuming there’s no dreaded re-count. When it’s a by-election, it’s the same, only with far more journalists in one place. This was how it panned out at the Wellingborough by-election in the early hours of February 16.

Your research and ability to remember numbers and faces is pretty important – nothing gets the adrenaline going like having to quote the percentage turnout at the last election (64.27% in 2019), the previous electorate size (80,765) and majority of the now ousted and somewhat notorious Peter Bone (18,540), while also looking for the faces of the candidates (11 of them in this case) who all show up to the count at different times.

While us local hacks largely have the generic leisure centre-based counting halls to ourselves on General Election night, save for a couple of agency stringers, a by-election sees ‘Network’ – the London-based national broadcasters – swarm out into the provinces.

It’s a mixture of getting multiple forms of communication done these days – no longer just getting some background colour for a piece that might be published in the next day’s paper or the next morning’s bulletin. The internet and social media have changed all that. You need candidate arrival quotes, pictures of ballot boxes coming in from various polling stations, pieces to camera every hour or more with ‘updates’, live two-ways with candidates or their team members, pre-records and Tiktoks and live blogs and Twitter (X) threads – not quote so much time for catching up with your fellow journos or campaigners you may not have seen since the last election.

The excellent Northants Telegraph team of four staff members, all of whom know the county and people better than anyone, were live blogging, Tweeting, writing online stories, getting quotes and pictures and liaising with contacts they’d built up over years. Likewise the independent Sarah Ward of subscription newsletter publication NNjournal was working her contacts and getting to the heart of Local Issues for Local People.

BBC Political Editor Chris Mason and Sky’s John Craig were the big beasts up from the big smoke and the regional press have to jostle to ensure they are in the front of the scrum for the big reveal. Mason had to leave before the declaration of results as he was due on air first thing but Craig was there until the end, kicked out with the rest of us at 5am as the Kettering Leisure Village closed its doors with most reporters still editing and filing copy.

There’s a lot of camaraderie behind the scenes and at this count some disquiet about a ‘pen’ that had been set up for journalists to stand in, a bit like sports’ mixed zones, which one determined hack decided to test by simply walking out into the hall to interview party representatives as we usually do. Back in your pen woman! (the pen was then moved closer to the entrance but candidates were kept safe from us by the nylon straps and poles more commonly found in a Post Office queue. Phew.

A note: we get warned A LOT about where and when we can report. We are trained journalists do know how to cover a count. We abide by impartiality rules and know we can’t show the ballot papers (although let’s face it, they are all anonymous really) and we don’t detail anything about results until the Returning Officer (in this case High Sheriff Milan Shah) gets on the podium with the final tariff. We KNOW we can’t ‘do anything that interferes with the integrity of the poll‘. We’re not influencers, we’re trained journalists.

Of course, there are always rumours – early doors there was talk of a Labour landslide. Others said it was going to be too close to calls and a recount was on the cards. There was also a man in a giant hat and a white coat called Nick the Flying Brick claiming he was going to abolish gravity. Another bloke was walking about the counting hall with a creepy ventriloquist’s dummy. The far right candidates must have done a weeks’ worth of their step counts just bimbling around the hall for hours.

By the wee small hours there was talk of a Labour landslide again. Reform’s Richard Tice turned up and made a lot of clams about how their candidate, former Tory donor Ben Habib was going to annihilate the Tory vote – the Conservatives still beat them by almost 3,500 votes. Labour’s Gen Kitchen got over 13,000.

Elections are performative for a lot of people. It gives them a misplaced sense of importance. They get a special entrance, a different queue, they’re allowed to hang out with people who might actually have power and influence now or in future. Journalists ask for their opinions and take their photos. They cease to be ‘normal’ folk for a while, even if they do, as Britain First’s Alex Merola found out, find fewer than 500 people cast their ballot for you. One candidate, the absent Ankit Love Jknpp Jay Mala Post-Mortem, got 18 votes. There’s an awful lot of hyperbole – ‘the people’ and ‘the public mood’ get quoted a lot, even though their only presence at the count is in the little pieces of white paper they stuck a cross in, which is the actual reason we’re all there.

Then there are the principled local candidates, independents like the former Green party candidate Marion Turner-Hawes and former Northants police office and parish councillor Kev Watts, along with the Green Party’s Bozeat-based Will Morris – who genuinely stick their heads above the parapet and endure the circus because they want to make a difference to the actual constituency. They hand over their £500 deposit knowing they probably won’t get it back (you need 5% of the overall vote to not ‘lose your deposit’).

They know it’s unlikely they will get anywhere near the Big Party candidates who may not even be from the area, but have been parachuted in to make a more general appeal to a wider electorate (see Ben Habib from the Reform Party, formerly the Brexit party, started by Farage after he dumped his UKIPers and to date with no electoral success.)

Reform’s Habib wasn’t even in the right town on the morning of the election, broadcasting from nearby Irthlingborough which is in a different constituency. But to listen to his gang of election supporters, you’d think he was the Second Coming, despite actually coming in third.

Perhaps surprising was the result for the Liberal Democrat candidate Ana Savage Gunn, a well-respected former local police officer who retrained in social care during the pandemic and who might usually expect to be at least in third place, but pushed into fourth with 1422 votes. The moderate Lib Dems might be expected to gain from the electorate’s dislike of the two major parties, but not here.

The unsung heroes of any election are the vote counters – those anonymous council and bank staff who you see flipping expertly through piles of ballot papers with those blue rubber thimbles at super speeds – clicking and stacking and shuffling each precious ballot, careful not to make a single error which could lead to an expensive and soul destroying recount.

Thankfully only one small recount was needed of a rogue box, at around 3am, when the PA system also needed fixing as we were all temporarily deafened by a loud blast of high-pitched feedback. Lots of standing around in our pens was followed by a rush to the stage as press and party supporters were released forward in turn for the result. The BBC, ITV and Sky were running live feeds from the hall, radio reporters were on hold to studios, the rest of us shooting and broadcasting on phones – instructions handed out as to who would be chasing the successful – and unsuccessful – candidates for reaction quotes and shots after the result. No longer the days of simply noting down the result with pen and paper now every scrap of life can be sent in real time.

In the end, we got our result at about 4am, we watched the relief for Labour’s Genevieve ‘Gen’ Kitchen, who had the added pressure of being the favourite in the run-up, even abandoning her honeymoon in Suffolk when Bone was ousted to start her campaign.

The Tory candidate Helen Harrison, completely unsupported by the national Conservative Party, had had to drag the ghost of her ‘boyfriend’ – the aforementioned disgraced former MP Peter Bone – around on the campaign. After losing the Tories enormous majority, she left the hall chased by the press in the glare of the TV cameras into the rainy early morning. The indignity of it all was visible on the faces of the old-school local Tory councillors (most of them apparently married to each other) who had at least turned up to support her.

The day after the successful result for Labour might have seen Gen Kitchen and husband Joe catch a lie-in, but no, the new member of parliament for Wellingborough had a press call at 11.30am and the following week saw her getting to grips with her new job, new office and a whole heap of urgent tasks for a patch that has been without an MP since Bone’s removal.

While the candidates disappeared into the 5am darkness, the hacks trying urgently to file final updates from the leisure centre were unceremoniously booted out into the rain to finish their reports in the nearest open fast-food restaurants which had working wifi. Some may have been lucky to get any sleep before having to cover the morning after the night before.

And this will all be happening again, in by-elections like Rochdale this week and possibly in Blackpool South, after yet another Tory MP was found to have misbehaved.

We are very much due a full General Election, the first since December 2019, (which was pre-Covid, pre-Partygate and cost-of-living crisis), when ALL candidates across the country will be going through the election night counts from leisure centres, just as they did in Wellingborough and Kingswood, Gloucestershire two weeks ago.

So even if you still feel confused and exhausted by the politics of the country, make sure you register to vote, and don’t forget your ID. It’s the only way to truly make your views on your community and the wider country count. Too many citizens of the world today don’t have that luxury.