How Nigel Farage, Laura Kuenssberg, Andrew Neil and other key faces fared on election night TV

Huw Edwards presented the BBC's election night coverage
BBC
David Sexton13 December 2019
WEST END FINAL

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Likeable and trustworthy he may be, as solid as they come, but charismatic Huw Edwards is not. Nor, we must admit, is he David Dimbleby.

Dimbleby, 81, had anchored every election night for the BBC for the last 40 years. He stood down from this almost hereditary post this year, saying “I’ve done 10 and I think I’ve had my stint”.

He was missed, but Edwards took his place comfortably enough, remaining seated almost throughout the night, maintaining his imperturbability as the startling results began to roll in.

He played the host, not the inquisitor. That role was well filled by Andrew Neil, pushing his interviewees hard from the start, telling John McDonnell that if the exit polls were anywhere near right, it was a catastrophe for Labour and telling Nigel Farage that the Brexit Party had no future.

Later, when Richard Burgon dimly blamed the media for Corbyn’s failure, Neil openly derided him: “Is that the best you can do?”

Meanwhile Laura Kuenssberg, offering the commentary Edwards didn’t, valiantly tried to find terms for the scale of the victory. Changes were seismic, jaws dropped.

By tradition, Jeremy Vine skips about various daft installations to help us visualise the bleeding obvious. Being all virtual these days, his lack of real relation to them makes him look openly deranged.

There was “the road to the door of Downing Street” again, a river of tiles, one for each seat. There was an imaginary chamber of the Commons, colouring up blue and red. There was even an old-fashioned swingometer.

“We’ve virtually broken our swingometer here with this swing,” he enthused.

Sophie Raworth had been dispatched into the rain outside Broadcasting House, to pace up and down another set of tiles, real this time, representing constituencies. “I’ll walk you along the red wall,” she offered. She trod on Croydon.

Later the installation was flooded, the onlookers scattered and we seemed to return to her only out of compassion.

ITV took a simpler approach. Tom Bradby sat at a big glossy table with the same four experts opposite each other throughout the night.

Quite why this four-square arrangement had been chosen rather than a helpful semi-circle was unclear.

Yet it worked better than the BBC’s gimmicks, these four being an endearingly mole-like psephologist, Professor Colin Rawlings, ITV’s incisive political editor Allegra Stratton and that very natural double act, Ed Balls and this paper’s editor George Osborne, who know whereof they speak.

Bradby has great charm, easily smoothing over technical hitches, and it was on a sofa here that the first really dramatic exchange of the night took place, when Alan Johnson bitterly confronted Momentum fanatic Jon Lansman, telling him Corbyn couldn’t lead his party out of a paper bag.

Sky News was unwatchable, the grim Dermot Murnaghan and Beth Rigby being upstaged from beginning to end by their prize guest, John Bercow, smirking in a jazz tie.

Channel 4’s Alternative Election Night was plain batty, despite contributors like Rachel Johnson, who confronted Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers.

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