IT WASN’T my first all-nighter. Where, in a universe far, far, away a Thursday night might have begun in a pub and ended up at the dancing — I use that word in the loosest possible sense — for the last quarter-century I’ve drifted into the kind of nerdom that involves going to election counts or propping my eyelids open to watch “commentators” propping their eyes open commentating on polling results that have yet to occur.
 
It’s all a bit silly. It would all still be there in the morning, but instead, my impatience wishes my sleep away.
 
The pay-off comes in the spectacle. Watching a world leader having to make an agonising speech accepting his defeat while standing next to a man dressed as an intergalactic bin, or the man about to replace him being congratulated on his victory by a seven-foot Elmo, is utterly ridiculous, but it beats most telly offerings these days.
 
There seems to be a ritual mention of the “Portillo moment” on these programmes as the talking heads compete with one another to remember where they were on election night 1997 when the man who craved the Tory leadership was consigned to a career of train documentaries — oh how we laughed.
 
This year’s election has thankfully generated a whole host of new memories, as would-be Tory leaders were put to the sword. Little did Grant Shapps (AKA Michael Green) know when he followed in Portillo’s footsteps into the MOD, he’d meet the same fate at the hands of his constituents, and when Penny Mordaunt lost by a few hundred votes I couldn’t help but remember when she carried that sword of state at the glittering coronation. I’m sure she’ll be able to dine out on that.

We had to wait until 6am for Liz Truss to fall, wearing her hallmark vacant countenance — maybe all that cheese she used to boast of exporting was fuelling a dream of more tours with the Trumpsters, who knows what goes on in that head?
 
The outgoing Scottish Tory leader’s loss was perfect though. Just weeks ago, Douglas Ross was adamant he would stand down from Westminster, and instead focus all his time on his job as leader of the opposition in Holyrood.

Instead, at the last possible moment, he effectively deselected a sick colleague to stand in a notionally safe Tory seat. Outcry in his party would force him to announce his intention to stand down as leader, but in a beautiful twist, he lost the seat.
 
This loss will probably be forgotten among the carnage of election night 2024, but more than Truss, Mordaunt, or Shapps, I can think of no better demonstration of Tory values.
 
All of these people will be fine though. Ross is still an MSP when he’s not running the line in Scottish premiership football, and the others will collect directorships and fat cheques on lecture circuits — being in Parliament was great for their CVs.
 
While the lobbyist chat becomes increasingly feverish on election coverage, and with every passing year the ludicrous graphics increasingly resemble the set of The Day Today, out in the real world other thoughts are sojourning.
 
My election day started on a wander to Grangemouth. Home to Scotland’s only oil refinery, it’s a town trying to survive under the cloud of the Ineos plant’s imminent closure. The future of the site, the town, and the workers couldn’t be more important, it stands at the very centre of the debate on a just transition away from fossil fuels.

Unite the union rightly points out that the future of the plant has been in doubt for years, but no government, British or Scottish, had bothered to build any serious plans to put the workers’ skills to good use in greener energy, and even now the governments have done little other than create a talking shop that barely talks.
 
We used to own the site when it was BP. You don’t have to believe in public ownership as an inherent good to understand why it made sense that we once owned it.

Its strategic importance to North Sea oil and gas production was and is obvious, and even the most outrageous free-marketeers in that notoriously rapacious industry understood it made no sense for each producer to build their own refinery.

Even now, as production winds down the plant is responsible for 8 per cent of Scotland’s GDP and 11 per cent of its manufacturing capacity, but it is held in the hands of a capricious, anti-trade union, tax-exile knight of the realm who bought it for a song — what fools we are.
 
Walking around Grangemouth, you can see the last remnants of prosperity. The town centre may be decayed and blighted with boarded-up shops now, but locally owned businesses still battle on against the odds in buildings built with the state’s stake in the industry when the future of North Sea oil looked bright.
 
Speaking to folk moving in and out of the shops, every single one talked of their fears for the future of the plant, of the need for money to be put into the town, and they all told me they would be voting Labour.
 
Make no mistake, I was as surprised as anyone. The area had returned Kenny MacAskill as their SNP MP in 2019 and he’d enjoyed a healthy majority before switching to Alba. To MacAskill’s credit and that of the Labour candidate, Brian Leishman, they had worked with Unite to call for action for jobs, skills, and for a just transition itself, but their calls have so far fallen on the deaf ears of both SNP and Tory governments.
 
That seat should have been the centre of the election in Britain, it is here that the future will be won or lost, but it gets next to no attention from government or media other than at the most superficial level.
 
“The plant needs a future. We need jobs, we need money in here, and we need houses for the young ones or this town will die,” a retired postman told me.
 
“I’m on my way to vote son, and I’ll be voting Labour this time. We need a change and this town needs hope. I know they’ll let us down, but we have to give it a try,” he added.
 
I met an elderly woman in town to buy wool, apparently this was the place to find it. “People come from miles around to shop here, but the place is in a state. It wasn’t always like this.”
 
With enormous enthusiasm, her daughter intervened: “I’ll be voting Labour, I’ve got a T-shirt, I’ve got a poster up. We need change, well we can only hope for it anyway.”
 
Apologetically, she added: “It’s nothing personal about Sunak, I know they promise things and forget, but it’s time for someone else to have a go.”
 
Much, much later, in the wee small hours, I saw Leishman win with a handsome majority. Grangemouth was Labour once more. “If he puts in half the shift on behalf of the plant he put in while a candidate, the place has a fighting chance,” I thought.
 
When we cut back from his count to the studio, replete with shiny graphics, grovelling Tories, grumpy nationalists, smug Labour consultants, and over-tired presenters they all seemed to rally as much around “change” and “hope” as much as my unscientific poll of the people of Grangemouth.
 
The hope and the change in the studio was different though. It was without qualification, without relief from soundbite, and uttered in absolute certainty that they would be delivered, without ever really pausing to ponder what exactly they meant as they trotted out Blair’s tired “new dawn” chat.
 
It’s quite the trick to pull, to turn half a page of numbers into a detailed plan, to turn a lack of ambition into hope, to turn stability into change.
 
The tragedy doesn’t lie there though, instead, to paraphrase Lloyd Cole, it lies in cynical operators making people “feel so guilty about their cynicism,” to have them arrive at the polling booth ready to be heartbroken.
 
The votes are now cast and counted, and a Labour government restored, but restoration of hope? That lies firmly with us.