Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollest, and in this extra special post-election episode, we're going to

dissect a historic victory for Labour Party after an extraordinary night of results that will

take a long while to fully digest. Looking at what happens now as Kirstarmer is swept

to power on an enormous majority, and which is soon at exits Downing Street after

Conservatives suffered their worst defeat in their history. We'll also hear from the final time

from our election diarists as voters in swing seats react to the result. But first, we thought it

might be fun to take you behind the scenes of what it's like covering a general election.

So throughout the night, I recorded some audio in the newsroom and elsewhere to say how the sausage gets made and how we as reporters get through

hours and hours of results. So here starting off with is the poll home election night diary.

Right, so it's just coming up to 7pm on Thursday, on polling day, and I'm just walking into the politics home office in Westminster.

I've been to cast my vote, so I'm just heading in now to kind of get things sorted and ready ahead of

10pm. It's one of those kind of odd days for political journalists where it's this huge,

momentous day, polling day, this combination of years of work and yet it's not really much for political journalists to do.

You can't really do any reporting on polling day. You just have to sort of deal with pictures

of the politicians as they go and cast their ballots and then sort of endless cavalcade of

images of dogs at polling stations or even cats or alpacas,

I think I've seen as well today.

And this is kind of a waiting game now until we get to 10pm when we see that exit poll and we kind of get a sense of what the final result is going to be,

if Labor have won this massive majority as they've been predicted to do, or perhaps things have tightened,

or perhaps things have maybe changed

over the past week or so they haven't really been picking up on. But until then, we don't really

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