It’s that time on the day after an election where you know it’s not long until you can go to sleep. Your feet ache. Your eyelids feel like they are about to slam shut any second and there’s nothing you can do about it. When I’ve finished writing this, I’m going to have a glass of wine, something to eat and go to bed.

We would have liked Rallings and Thrasher’s predication of gains to be right. After all these years of traumatic election nights during the Coalition years, we just wanted to catch a break. We didn’t want to be losing people. For every one of the seats that we lost, a team has been working its backside off for months and has seen its dreams shattered.  The number we’ve lost is relatively small, certainly compared to previous years, but every one is painful. It equally hurts when you come close to making a gain but don’t pull it off. Spare a thought for poor Daniel Coleman who lost out in the Strathmartine ward in Dundee by just 9 votes. Behind every result is a long series of nights door-knocking in the freezing cold, of weekends given up to leafletting, of all your free time being taken up with casework.

Now, though, there is a lot of good news. We have had some great results that bode well for our short term objective of a decent performance in the General Election. On the basis of today’s results, at least 6 seats in Scotland are most definitely in play – and then you look at places south of the border like St Albans, Lewes, Eastbourne, Eastleigh, Bath, Cheltenham. There is direct, recent evidence that we are the main challengers in these seats. In Edinburgh West, North East Fife, Argyll and Bute, Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, Ross Skye and Lochaber and East Dunbartonshire, we can confidently say that we are the main challengers to the SNP.

One of the advantages, if you can call it that, is that Theresa May can’t pretend any more that there is the slightest possibility of Jeremy Corbyn hanging pictures of Che Guevara all over Number 10. We all know she is going to be the PM on 9th June. We just need to make sure that Parliament has the chance to exercise its authority and stop her from doing things that are clearly not in the national interest like drag us out of the single market. There needs to be some sort of safety mechanism that can get out out of their hard brexit once it becomes obvious what a disaster it is going to be. The people must be allowed to vote on the deal and remain if they so wish.