Author: Phil

The mayoral result did not come out until near enough midnight and some of the constituency results weren’t confirmed until almost 1am. Considering the count started at about 8.30am this is a pretty poor performance on the part of London Elects – which is effectively a combination of GLA staff and various borough election people.

I was at one of the the three counts at Olympia in the afternoon, the photo above shows the Ealing and Hillingdon part of the count. Officially I was a counting agent but in practice there was not much to do except stand around and chat to people. Angie Bray was on good form and looking forward to going on holiday after working hard to get out the vote in her future Central Ealing and Acton constituency. She has stood down from the assembly and her West Central seat has been won by senior Westminster councillor Kit Malthouse. By the time I got to the count at 2.30pm Richard Barnes was already pretty confident of his seat and that Boris would win the mayoralty.

At Olympia they were counting six constituencies. By 4pm they had only got about half the voting papers through the scanners. All the computers were working fine but a combination of a high turnout and problems keeping the scanners online meant that there were just not enough scanners to do the job. Next time London Elects need to make sure that they do the job properly. As soon as Johnson was confirmed as the candidate for the Tories it wasn’t a big leap of imagination to think that turnout might go up. Doh! It was a bit humiliating to have London’s result fully 24 hours after many local election results and to miss even the 10pm news the next day. Someone voting early on Thursday and going to bed at a reasonable time on Friday would not have known the result of their action for two days. Ridiculous.

It was a good night for the Tories on the London Assembly. Although they lost a seat, Bob Blackman’s in Brent & Harrow, they gained three London-wide seats so the number of Tory AMs went up by two to eleven. It was previously accepted wisdom amongst the Tories that they would never get any London-wide seats – strangely the loss of Brent & Harrow was part of the reason why they became available. The first two places go to very able Tory mayoral hopefuls Andrew Boff and Victoria Borwick. The third place goes to Bexley councillor Gareth Bacon who is also their cabinet member for environment. No doubt all three will be somewhat surprised to have new jobs.

With only four of the Tory old guard returning to the assembly the new Mayor will have a largely new team assembly members to support and challenge him.

Labour gained a seat but the LibDems were the big losers, losing two seats. The other losers were the One London (ex-UKIP) pair who have left the assembly.

The full assembly results are here.

The bad news from last night is that the odious Richard Barnbrook got an assembly seat for the BNP. The BNP nudged over the 5% hurdle, polling 5.33% of the London-wide vote.

It is a shame that more of the disaffected voters who voted for them didn’t vote for UKIP – at least a UKIP member would have been given a hearing and would be able to represent the views of those that feel that the major parties aren’t for them. The BNP will be ignored with their weird mixture of views which combine pretty much naked racism and socialism. I am not a UKIP supporter – I am probably at the other end of the right spectrum but would ten times rather give UKIP house room than the BNP.