The media entrepreneur, who was given a peerage by Tony Blair aged just 34, had played a big backroom role as a fixer for Labour, leading election fundraising activities. Alli’s fans in the party say he was critical in filling up Labour’s election coffers, as well as in making his own funds and properties available for Starmer and his team.
In the years before the campaign, Alli let Labour officials use his offices in central London for election planning away days. During the short campaign, he provided the Starmer family with a bolthole, a gift estimated to be worth £20,000 in accommodation costs, a gesture which would later prove highly controversial.”
That night, Starmer wanted to eat dinner privately with his family and delay the moment their lives would change forever. He took a call around 7 p.m. from McSweeney, who gave him his estimate of the likely result. Based on the party’s internal numbers, gathered from teams around the country, McSweeney predicted a majority of close to 200.
Starmer’s aides arrived at Alli’s apartment late in the evening, at around 9.40 p.m, just 20 minutes or so before the exit poll was due to be announced. The TV was tuned to the BBC. Under Professor Sir John Curtice’s guidance, the exit poll has been astonishingly accurate in recent years.
The survey, on behalf of ITV, the BBC and Sky, questioned 20,000 people who had just voted at a carefully selected sample of polling stations across the country, calibrated to enable Curtice’s team to extrapolate the findings into a national estimate of the final result.
Starmer, Victoria and their teenage son and daughter huddled together on the sofa to watch. They were about to discover if the past four years of Starmer’s efforts to detoxify his party and come up with a convincing offer to voters had paid off.
