NOW that the dust has settled and a new Government has been installed for the UK I thought I would reflect on how events unfolded ahead of what was to become a historic landslide victory for Labour last week. They say that journalists write the first draft of history and seemed that it was certainly the case last week.

Following May’s election count for Cumbria’s police fire and crime commissioner at the beginning of May I certainly did not fancy another 21-hour shift so I decided to start at 10pm when the polls closed and we soon had an idea of how events might unfold with the publication of the exit polls.

The prediction was indeed for a Labour landslide with 410 seats, the Tories losing a lot of seats, after getting hammered by voters, following the threat from Reform UK and the Lib Dems doing quite well following their leader’s well publicised stunts which aimed to highlight some major issues such as sewage in our rivers and lakes.

The candidates started to arrive after 10pm, together with their supporters and campaigners, and it was not long before the first of the ballot boxes followed suit.

After the votes were verified the count started proper and it was soon clear that, judging by the height of the piles of ballot papers, that on the numerous tables Labour were looking to be ahead with both the Conservatives and Reform UK neck and neck for second place.

The returning officer for the evening was Chris Holmes DL, who is the High Sheriff of Cumbria, who despite the velvet finery was actually a down to earth chap who was quite helpful. But you would not mess with him because the dude was packing a sword.

As always with these occasions you are at the mercy of the speed of the people who are doing the counting but the announcement eventually arrived around 3.30am.

As it turned out Carlisle had followed the majority of the country and elected Labour’s Julie Minns to be its next MP followed by the outgoing Conservative MP John Stevenson, who’s closely followed by Stephen Ward of Reform UK, with Brian Wernham of the Lib Dems next and Gavin Hawkton of the Greens in fifth place.

Speaking after the announcement Ms Minns said she felt “incredibly humbled” by the trust that had been placed with her and added: “I feel delighted to have this opportunity and I can’t wait to get started.”

She said that her first priority was making sure that they were able to support all the people in Carlisle and she said that the city was faced with “challenging individual problems”.

She added: “Getting to grips with that case work, making sure they were there to support people, making sure, as I have made clear all the way through the campaign, that I am visible and engaged and that people know where they can reach me.”

Ms Minns said she was hoping that the UK would have a Labour Government along with the Labour MP in Carlisle that would focus on priorities such as the cost of living crisis, the NHS, public transport and antisocial behaviour, which people had raised on the doorstep throughout the campaign.

Mr Stevenson said he was feeling fine after the announcement and added: “This is democracy in action and I fully respect the decision of the people, as I should, it has been a privilege and an honour to have been the member of Parliament for 14 years.

“I think Carlisle is a wonderful city, I think it has a great future ahead of it, there is plenty of investment coming in, which I feel I have been part of and I wish my successor all the best.”

He said he had left a mark on the city during the past 14 years and added: “I genuinely do. I think the investments that are already in the city and the investments that are coming in are fantastic and I think they will help change the city over the years in a very positive direction.”

When asked how he was planning to fill his time now that he was no longer the Carlisle MP he said he would probably play more golf.

Lib Dems candidate Brian Wernham said the thing that struck him was that Labour got a vote share in Carlisle of 39 percent, which was in line with what was predicted by the opinion polls and was repeated across the country, which meant that just four out of 10 people had elected the new Labour Government with a “supermajority”.

He said: “I think there are going to be big calls for proportional representation from the Reform party, as well of course historically the Liberal Democrats, also the Green party, and probably even the Conservative party will be pushing Kier Starmer to put in proportional representation.

“We can’t continue in this country with having these huge supermajorities with parties getting less than 50 percent of the vote.”

Gavin Hawkton, the Green party candidate, said he was feeling positive and added: “We have increased our vote share, we’ve increased the number of our votes, we are positive about the result, it’s a positive result for the Green party.”

He agreed that they were “hindered” by the first past the post voting system. He said: “We had such a great response on the doorstep, people wanted to vote Green, but they were scared of letting Tories in. So, a lot of people who did want to vote Green were scared not to do so.“They won’t have the same problem next time at the General Election so we going to come back stronger and we are going to come back and increase our vote share further.”

Having said that, because I had to phone in the results, by that time all of the other candidates had quite rightly gone home for some well earned rest. But not for me as I managed to file to articles and finally clocked off by 6am.