The View from City Hall

Yesterday evening, I was at City Hall in London to watch the Mayoral proceedings unfold. While the evening delivered the expected result of a Boris victory — incidentally, YouGov was the most accurate pollster once again, with Peter Kellner calling 52 vs 48 to Boris at 7:30pm — it was a tense affair. Missing ballot boxes and broken counting machines in Brent and Harrow delayed the final announcement until nearly midnight.

Amid the confusion, I managed to speak to Dan Hodges, Blairite blogger with the Telegraph, who said early on he still believed that Boris would prevail and discussed Ed Miliband’s egging in Southampton. The LSE’s London election expert Tony Travers provided some insight into how the second preference voting system works and Chuka Umanna, the Labour MP for Streatham, told me he was delighted with Labour’s 800+ gains in the local elections but was unsure of a Ken victory.