Election night is an incredibly stressful time. But it’s also exhilarating – and this is why

The high drama of the night before the results emerge never disappoints – even if we get what we expected

Jo Swinson provided the ‘Portillo moment’ in the early hours of Friday morning (Reuters)

The thrill of election night for someone like me is that you get five years’ worth of politics in 10 hours. It starts with the shock of the exit poll – the gasp in the office as all the pre-written “too-close-to-call” articles hit the spike – and carries on until the winner has delivered an early-morning victory speech to cheering supporters.

(The spike, incidentally, is one of those phrases in journalism that survives from the analogue age: it used to be a literal spike on a desk, on which rejected copy would be “spiked”.)

The sensible plan is always to get a few hours’ sleep after the exit poll and before the main flow of results starts coming in around 2am, but sensible plans are for wimps. I wrote my instant comment on the exit poll and then got the Tube home. Some people were talking about Jo Swinson’s terrible mistake, but most seemed drunkenly oblivious to the sudden change in the political landscape.