For the last year or so, I’ve been fixated on the general election. Not the prospect of a new government after it, or the gaffes, news and chatter leading up to it (although there will be plenty of chat: I’m already booked in to do the Sky News Press Preview four times before election night). No, it’s the actual night of the election that I can’t stop thinking about.
It’s the ballots being counted, the exit polls, the results, the acceptance speeches and the losing candidates staring at their shoes. It’s the cars slowly pulling up outside the shiny black door of Number 10. It’s the idea that this period of history - this age of enshittification - will have an end date, and there will be a night when I can stay up and watch it happen. That has kept me going.
Now that end has an actual date. Even if Rishi Sunak wins, the world will be changed on July 5th. (And the world would have had to have changed very much indeed for him to win.) So thank you, Rishi, for an end to an era - even though we have no idea what the next holds. The end is enough for me.
On past election nights, I’ve been working. I was reporting for Channel 4’s Alternative Election Night at the count in Holborn and St. Pancras when Keir Starmer won his seat in 2015, and in Sheffield in 2017 when Nick Clegg lost his. (I was pregnant in 2017 and went to Sheffield even though everyone thought Clegg would win and I’d never get on air. I ended up going live with Jeremy Paxman three times throughout the night, with not a drop of caffeine in my system.)
Being at a count is electric. It’s hard to imagine that rows of people spending hours counting bits of paper in a sports hall could be absolutely riveting, but it truly is. This time, I have serious plans for the election night: preparatory naps, followed by a party on my sofa.
I’ve never done a proper election night from home before, so let me know your tips. What coverage should I watch? What should I eat? The important stuff.
In other news - I have a big piece on the front cover of the Guardian Saturday magazine tomorrow. (It’s the 5,000-word piece that came from the 27,500-word transcript I mentioned in my last newsletter.) I have interviewed witch doctors in Nigeria, Taliban warlords in Afghanistan and sex robot manufacturers in California, but I have never had an experience quite as unsettling as the day I spent with the Collins family in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania reporting this piece.
My other story from Pennsylvania - about the mother accused of making deepfake videos to smear her daughter’s cheerleading rivals - came out just after the last LRN. You can read it here.
And: I’m incredibly happy to say that I will be interviewing the legend that is Jon Ronson on Monday June 3rd at the Union Chapel in London for Intelligence Squared. Tickets are nearly sold out, I am told.
Things that have caught my eyes and ears:
Am learning the secret of comedy - seriously, I am - from the audiobook of Joel Morris’s excellent Be Funny or Die. I have also learned some excellent jokes. (Clowns divorce? Custardy battle.)
Brain is fizzing after reading Timandra Harkness’s Technology is Not the Problem - a book about taking back agency, refusing to be slaves to convenience, narcissism and dopamine
Enjoyed getting lost in the dark intimacy of Catching Fire - The Story of Anita Pallenberg, but was disappointed that the story of Anita Pallenberg pretty much ended for the filmmakers when she stopped being a sexy drug addict in her 40s. She did live for three more decades after this; life does not end at 45 - I hope
Marvelled at the World Press Photo exhibition. The photo of the year left me speechless.