Seconds after the polls closed a collective gasp rippled across Britain which threatened to register on the Richter Scale.
That exit poll, which claimed Labour were 77 seats behind the Tories and virtually wiped off the map in Scotland, and that the Lib Dems had fallen back to the number of seats they used to win in Jeremy Thorpe’s day, left everyone who has a remote knowledge of British politics gobsmacked.
Such was the disparity between the neck-and-neck predictions of professional pollsters you had to rub your eyes at the screen and pinch yourself to see if this wasn’t a very bad dream.
Even among the most optimistic of Tory campaigners this turnaround in the polls was jaw-dropping, baffling and astonishing.
Paddy Ashdown gave us hope by assuring us that his hat would be eaten if the poll was accurate.
A clearly shocked Labour spokesman tried to bat it off with a quote about these polls being wrong before, notably in 1992.
But Harriet Harman didn’t seem to share Ashdown’s confidence that we’d seen a cock-up on a grand scale.
Her worried frown said it all.
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