keep going, really. laura likes a chocolate. she really does. and she was passing me chocolates and nuts through the evening. this is wall—to—wall political coverage. i this postcode is where power lies most of the time — not during an election campaign. westminster's the least important place to be. we were actually on the way to a different story when we got the phone call — rishi sunak�*s going to call an election. we had to rip up our plans. i was thinking, "this is not the time "to stumble over my words," and i kept practising the different varieties of what it might be in the shower. i was like, "and the exit poll predicts..." cheering pips on the radio bbc

news at 4 o'clock. ministers are due to hold a cabinet meeting in downing street this afternoon, amid growing speculation that the date for a general election could be announced, possibly as early as today. is this it, mr barclay? are we heading to the polls? so, i'm chris mason, the bbc�*s political editor, and i've had a busy few months. can i bring in chris mason? there might be some delay because of the weather. it feels a little brighter than it did a few minutes ago, albeit it seemed to be getting worse, didn't it, a few minutes ago? sounds trivial, that, but it'll matter. and it'll matter in there, because... he wants it to look... yeah, because this is a moment. i think fairly soon we will see that lectern appear. and then shortly after that, hear from the prime minister. so, i wanted to be a reporter from about the age of seven. i just love telling stories.

chris on report: at teatime, this. earlier today, i spoke with his majesty the king to request the dissolution of parliament. the king has granted this request and we will have a general election on the 4th ofjuly. i can still feel that water, like, seven weeks on. so, this is it. a general election is on. so, the night before rishi sunak�*s soggy announcement in downing street, i started getting texts from people saying, "something weird's going on," and when you have people who i speak to at the heart of government every single day, who are suddenly not returning calls, because if somebody at the other end of the phone sees me ringing and they cannot answer honestly the question that they think i'm going to put to them, the solution is don't answer the phone. but yeah, it did surprise everyone. suddenly, just like that, we're in election mode. i'm laura kuenssberg and i present our big sunday morning news and politics show. good morning.

your party has run this country for a generation. i also work on newscast. now we are in an election campaign. i presented the election programme overnight. the exit poll is predicting a labour landslide. and i was in downing street the day after the election, which was very exciting. laura kuenssberg is in downing street for us now. laura. so, i became a journalist because i'm really nosy and i love watching tv. so, do you think that you are going to be deputy prime minister by the end of the weekend? i thought westminster was for weirdos, and i wasn't entirely wrong. and then i got there and then i suppose i got the bug. hi, there, andrew. we're at the left bank centre here in hereford on an... every election that i have ever covered, which is quite a few, people have said, "oh, it's unbelievably stage—managed and controlled." keir starmer. applause "how appalling." yes, it seems true that keir starmer and rishi sunak did fewer on—the—street encounters. good morning, prime minister. but we haven't had a campaign for a long time in this country

where politicians are just turning up randomly and standing on a soapbox — not least, actually, politicians in this era have got to think really carefully about their security. i'm alex forsyth. i've got two jobs at the bbc. day to day, i'm a political correspondent in westminster, and every friday i present any questions, which is a topical discussion programme on radio 4. we're so happy to have you here. when you are giving a party coverage, you're not necessarilyjust giving them a platform, you should also be giving them scrutiny. could we rename this document today your last chance saloon? the bbc, ithink, is quite rightly scrutinised as to the level of coverage it gives parties during the campaign, but that... it isn't random. there is a calculation behind that. your party's been complaining about rishi sunak using private jets. except we learnt this week that you accepted a private jet flight. and very broadly speaking, the way the bbc works out how much coverage it's going to give each party depends on that party's electoral support that it's had

in the past. why would leaving. a 300—year—old union with england not be even worse? jeering there are also other factors taken into consideration. for example, you know, if it is a relatively new party, you've got to bear that in mind. you accuse other parties of broken promises, but isn't this really a list of unrealistic promises, a wish list? if that party's had a consistent position in the polls, that will come into it as well. and sometimes it might be how widely that party's standing in the election, so how many candidates they're standing and where. would the king survive as head of state of an independent wales ? um, it would be up to the people of wales. so, there's a whole, you know, range of things that are taken into account when the bbc decides how much coverage it's giving each party. the minute an election is called, everything goes crazy. and the reason it goes crazy is this. this postcode is where power lies, westminster, most of the time. not during an election campaign.

it heads to — it heads everywhere. it heads to the 650 constituencies that are being fought. so i spent six weeks in the back of a van which didn't have any windows in the back. it's very glamorous. and you just have to be prepared, really, for the unexpected. shouting you don't know where you're going to be or really who you're going to be with, but that is the excitement. and when i say campaigns are exhilarating, that is why, because this is wall—to—wall political coverage. here we go. funny old business, following the prime minister around on the campaign trail. so, the day would start with us waking up in a budget hotel somewhere. then, usually, by first thing, we've got an idea about where we're going. you need a really supportive partner, and i'm kind of lucky i've got one, because you don't get home a lot and it can be exhausting. then we're heading off

to our first sort of filming location, often with the conservative leader or the labour leader, but it could just as easily be the scottish national party or reform or the liberal democrats. you do have to get used to living out of a suitcase. i am a light and quick packer these days. i know exactly what i need for, you know, wherever you might end up. you can live off service station sandwiches and it's just not the best. i don't think i saw a vegetable for quite a long time, successive nights on the election campaign. we turn up at one of their events. these events always have a sort of splash of absurdity to them. i always kind of think the key thing to remember as a politicaljournalist in an election campaign is don't start treating the absurd as normal. it was the liberal democrat leader, ed davey, was doing one of his now famous political stunts through the campaign, and there was a giant water slide. ed laughs so... and this could apply to any party, it's not a party political thing, where you say

thank you, you know, do a stump speech, which, as a journalist, you've heard a million times before, because they say the same thing over and over again. perfectly reasonable from their perspective, you're not going to do a different speech every time. and message discipline, you want to say the same thing. that's consistent. but i mean, honestly, by the end i could recite the words of all of them. they'll stage some event in a workplace. in walks the leader. rishi sunak had this knack, ijust noticed this when you see it the third or fourth time, to create a sort of sense of occasion, i think. he would almostjog into the arena. they are fantastic champions for their local communities and for all of you. even though he's walking around a warehouse or whatever. jog in. hello. keir. nice to see you. how are you doing? they praise their candidate, who would usually, you know, introduce them and they stood at the side. and we'll launch ourl manifesto tomorrow. take some questions. back onto the bus, the battle buses, trundle off to the next place, and that can happen three orfour times every single day. i asked him why young people should vote conservative.

it's not exactly likely that either the labour party or the conservative party are going to go, "yeah, actually, we totally agree." so the whole thing's absurd. but, i mean, i love the absurd. i think every reporter has to have a keen sense of the absurd, and an election campaign is like a festival of absurdity. there were some days i'd be in westminster, there were some days i'd be following a party leader. there were some points i was covering the debates, when you had the big leadership debates. 0k, keir... if there's that much - wrong with the system, who's the guy in charge - of the system over the last 14 years? why is it so bad? well, keir, you want to be in charge... well, why is it? ..but you've got nothing to say to people about what you would do about it. but i wouldn't change it, because it's the best part of the job, really, is that you get to go and see so many places and meet so many communities and so many brilliant people, and they're all fascinating. 15 seconds. when a politician doesn't answer a question, our viewers are really smart and they can see it a mile off. three, two, one, go. election week three, and many, many manifestos. i mean, every sunday morning, one of the things i'm trying

to do is get politicians to stick to the point that our viewers want to know about, rather than make the point that they want to make. ourfinal interview with rishi sunak, though, he was almost, i mean, you could see in almost every answer he was just determined to give his answer and then shove in his is—second slogan at the end of every single answer. and our viewers hate it. under the labour party, they will go down under the conservatives. and i will say to you, prime minister, the same as i've said to every politician during this campaign, is our voters have been very clear with us. they want our politicians to answer questions about their plans and their policy, rather than trying to attack the other side. and, of course, everybody watching at home has got a different view, you know, so completely normal for me on a sunday to then open up the inbox afterwards. we get loads of emails from viewers, which is really important. but every week you open up the inbox and you get somebody saying, "i can't believe you kept interrupting them too much." next email, "i can't believe that you let them "keep on repeating their slogans "and you didn't interrupt them

enough," so it's very hard. you can't please all the people all the time. but there is, particularly in a campaign when they've got their slogans that they just want to get across, we have this kind of tug of war. stand—out moments of this campaign, firstly, rishi sunak getting soaked in downing street, the classic example of how the picture will always triumph over the words if the picture is strong enough. and somebody in a suit looking absurd is going to be more memorable than whatever they say. in any election campaign, you have the moments that parties don't control or don't expect or maybe mess up a bit. you had the conservatives going into it with their backs against the wall. they came out kind of scrappy and fighting from the beginning. you had this flurry of policy announcements from the conservatives almost straight off the bat, things like the national service announcement. it's going to foster| a culture of service which is going to be incredibly powerful. it's an expensive gimmick. other key moments, d—day. rishi sunak bunking off d—day early, which led conservatives

to just tear their hair out. theyjust thought, "how on earth do you possibly defend that?" of course, they couldn't. the other thing was betting, all of the allegations about betting. the prime minister says he was incredibly angry when he found out about allegations over betting on the date of the general election. there were those who did know who were placing bets. we know factually that's the case with some and with others it's alleged. now, we know from one now former conservative mp, conservative candidate, who acknowledged that that's what he'd done. he admitted it. the others, you know, there's still investigations going on involving the gambling commission. well, like you, i was- incredibly angry, incredibly angry to learn - of these allegations. and we had some really difficult internal conversations around it, because there is a tussle, there's a tussle around the right to privacy and the public interest, and these things are keenly contested. and that was lively conversations within the bbc involving lawyers and others

as to what we were going to report. labour had picked up the betting markets and so were aware that something was up and acted really, really quickly. and we saw the consequence of that at the tail end of the campaign where when you went on some of the big news websites like the sun, for instance, labour had bought out the banner advertising all the way around them. now, you can only do that if you act quickly and you know when the election, or you assume you know when the election is going to be. labour came into this campaign knowing, i think, knowing that power was within their grasp, which was why they were cautious, which was why they were deliberate in the messages they put out. you went into this campaign conservatives on the back foot in terms of public opinion, labour looking to be ahead and really not wanting to mess it up. and the day before polling day, that's almost exactly where we ended up. so, months of planning go into making an election night programme.

so you've got, number one, a huge logistical operation, building this kind of temporary factory of news at all the 650 counts. right, you've got clacton . on line one and on line six. here we have a vision of virtually all the leisure centres across wales. then you've got other colleagues like the amazing kirsty wark in glasgow. if this exit poll is in any way true, we could be sitting with the new secretary of state for scotland. or our teams in northern ireland. it's a night full of - strange contradictions. how are you feeling at the moment, mr paisley? would you mind giving us a few words for bbc news? are you confident of keeping your seat tonight, mr paisley? people in all parts of the country, victoria derbyshire with rishi sunak. he looked pretty dejected on stage, victoria. fiona bruce with keir starmer. fiona bruce is there.

what are you hearing, fiona? well, no nervousness - here about losing his seat, i have to say. to then just all these different people doing different things so that we can bring everything together. then there's the graphics, which, if you're a real tv nerd, are a very exciting thing that's always evolving. and every time there's an election programme, our graphics team try to come up with something that's even bigger and better. these bits here are actually the balconies, i guess, for want of a better word. then also you've got all the data scientists, all the people under professorjohn curtice who are putting together then all the information in the exit poll from 20,000 people around the country. then you've got the studio operation, which is also enormous. so it goes from, you know, somebody standing outside a polling station with a clipboard to then a director running more than 650 live television feeds, to then 100 people working on the data in this building. and then eventually that gets down to me sitting, staring into the camera. one minute to transmission. i'm clive myrie, i am a bbc

journalist and news presenter, and on the night ofjuly the 4th, i was presenting the bbc�*s overnight elections programme. so it's scripted for five minutes until ten o'clock and then we are busking it completely, 100%, for the vast majority of the time that we're on air, that we're on air, which is ten hours. ok, let's bring you an update on that situation. you can be, like, broadcasting on the news channel, for instance, with breaking news. it would be, i don't know, two, three hours tops. you might be ad—libbing a little bit, but not, clearly, for ten hours. that's the difference. 0ur political correspondent . alex forsyth, she's in central lobby in the houses of— parliament, between the commons

and the lords. people call sometimes westminster "the bubble", and i think it really can be a bubble. you can be quite insulated from what's going on in the kind of wider world. the question, as you say, of course, is will it work? i can talk now to ian blackford from the snp. miriam cates mp and danny kruger mp. and we can talk now to angela rayner, who is the deputy leader of the labour party. angela rayner, thank you for being with us. there can be a tendency to spend a lot of your time with people who are... think a similar way, whose assessment and interpretation of politics is driven by the events that are happening inside westminster, or what people in westminster are talking about and that can feel kind of huge. but sometimes the way that's being perceived from the outside isn't the way it always looks from the inside. so i think it's completely crucial that journalists spend time away from westminster.

i'm ed thomas, i'm the bbc�*s uk editor. i'm based outside of london, in salford. my brief is to get into communities and speak to people the bbc doesn't always really get hold of, and that's what we've done this election. so, we went to middlesbrough, which is covered by cleveland police. we also went to peterborough, which has been transformed by immigration, and we went to grimsby, a town which has really been hit by the cost—of—living crisis. there's nothing here. it's gone. can politics fix this? no, not at all. we were actually on the way to a different story when we got the phone call — rishi sunak�*s going to call an election. we had to rip up our plans. we had to go to bury, test the temperature there. it was a real bellwether seat, bury north. and what was really telling when we got to bury north was that there are certain issues that people really do care about, and that maybe this election was going to be the election where policy mattered. yeah, general election.

what's your reaction? thank god. about time. summer general election. sooner the better, please. whoever ticks the most boxes for me, they're for me. 15,14,13,12,11,| ten, nine, eight... clive, laura, good luck. enjoy it. ..seven, six, five... coming to eight, next. stop talking. ..four, three, two... show me the figures. three, two, one. cut. cue laura. and as big ben strikes ten, the exit poll is predicting a labour landslide. put vis three in the tower. sir keir starmer will become prime minister with a majority of around 170 seats. the exit poll predicts that labour will have captured 1110 seats, adding 209. it suggests the conservatives will have lost 241 mps, landing on 131. i'm john curtice, professor of politics at the university of strathclyde. an exit poll is a poll

in which people are asked, as they leave the polling station, to fill in a ballot paper, which is an imitation of the one they've just completed, to indicate how they have voted, and that information is used to try and work out how many seats each of the parties is going to win across the country as a whole. in other words, it's essentially a prediction of the outcome on the basis of how people said they voted on the day. steve baker, who is in the studio here with us. steve, i'm sorry to be putting you up here on the screen like this, but, you know, we are giving you a less than 1% chance of hanging on to your seat. and then by about nine o'clock, they kind of have a good idea of where it's going to go. and then at 9.30, a very small group of us get told what the results are, but we cannot legally broadcast that until ten o'clock, because the polls are still open, so you can't tell anyone what the result might be, because people can still make their decisions. so anybody who gets told anything before ten o'clock is under oath.

they are under a legal obligation not to say anything. and one of the protections that i engage in, just for the protection of myself and my colleagues, we do not have our mobile phones until ten o'clock in the evening. so that means, although whatever happens elsewhere, i can say, "it's not us. "we did not have access to the outside world." well, obviously the exit poll, it's quite disappointing at the moment, but it is just a poll. do you believe these numbers, angela rayner? well, the numbers are - encouraging, but of course the exit poll is a poll. and exit polls are not perfect, but they're pretty damn close. and they've got an amazing track record of telling you what the overall outcome is going to be. and that's why i know in all the political parties' h05, and all the party leaders, they're all sitting there watching it. so when i had to give the result of what it said, i know all of the people that i know from working in politics, i know they're all watching it thinking, "oh, my god, what happened? what is going to happen?" so i was thinking, "this is not the time to stumble

over my words." john curtice comes into this room at about 9.110. we're on the air at ten o'clock and the numbers get read out. my first and probably biggest responsibility of the overnight show was that at 30 seconds past ten, after clive and laura had read out the numbers, they were going to go — and laura's been teasing me about this for ages, because she did it several times — they're going to read the numbers out and then they're going to go, "chris," and then the red light goes on on the camera and i have to look straight down the camera, and i've got about a minute to kind of crystallise what it might mean. chris. blimey. i get a tremendous buzz out of broadcasting. that's what gets me out of bed every day. and i make no apology for that. i love broadcasting, ijust, i love it. you feel the nerves of the big moments. at the time, there was talk that borisjohnson might serve as prime minister into the 2030s. so, laura, first question

to chris on camera one next, then. when you're at the election count the night before, and there's all these stories coming in from around the country, you know, different things happening in different areas, on any other day, each one of those could be huge. as i said on the night, it's a night of a thousand stories. in this election, big names that lost their seats, liz truss, for example. an endless political soap opera out of internal- rivalries and divisions. the defence secretary loses his seat. in normal times, the defence secretary losing theirjob would be a lead news story. there were multiple stories, i think. 0bviously, labour's landslide victory, the worst conservative result in history, but also the development of the greens. i am feeling over the moon and so grateful for all of the support we've received. and the share of the vote across all the different parties. i mean, it is interesting that labour won with a lower share of the vote than jeremy corbyn.

cheering. we knew that the results from scotland would be fascinating. the snp were caught up in this tsunami, this wave of labour victories, and they were battered, no question about it. no—one, i think, expected them to crash the way that they did, down to nine seats from 118, losing 39, which is absolutely astonishing. much of it across that central belt, so it was a difficult night. and i interviewed stephen flynn, the leader of the snp at westminster. and i said to him on air, "you look shellshocked. "you look as if you've just been hit by a bus." that's what he looked like to me. he just couldn't believe it. you sound shellshocked and you look shellshocked. was there any suggestion with you and the other snp candidates out there on the ground that this would come?

i'm probably looking a little bit shellshocked, i've been awake for 211 hours, so forgive me for that. but yeah, no, nobody was... nobody was expecting this scale of defeat. but it's amazing that very quickly the next day, how much the kind of detail of the night before fades. i mean, it matters hugely, but it fades, because things shift so fast. so the moment that rishi sunak went and spoke to the king and says that he's resigning as prime minister, and before you know it, you've got the labour supporters lining downing street and keir starmer driving up, you know, and then the steps of downing street moment for keir starmer. and within hours, you've got a whole new cabinet appointed. i mean, these things move so fast. the pamphlet, the booklet... in fact, i'm going to get it. all right. so i've just been given the pamphlets of the...

the directory... i've even put my name on it so no—one nicks it and claims it's theirs. the directory of new members. so this isn't all mps, this is new members. hundreds of them. the special programme came off air at eight in the morning. i was in downing street at 9.15. so, yeah, so i was on the air for 26 hours straight and i was up for nearly 36 hours straight if i don't include the little nap i tried to have on wednesday afternoon. ifollowed laura kuenssberg's advice of no coffee overnight. so it's tea by night and coffee by day. then when you get to the morning, sausage sandwich, jelly babies, bananas and coffee. and thenjust keep going, really. we can now say with certainty that labour have won the 2024 general election. as i speak, they have gained 326 seats. it's now 327. the key is just making sure that you stay awake. but that's not a problem, because you've got adrenaline

coursing through your veins anyway, because it's such an amazing moment. politics is always this massive historical roller—coaster of power and rivalry and dynasties competing with each other. politicians get a hard rap, often deservedly so, but they're also people, and all their families that get, you know, sort of caught up in the wake of it, and they give up a lot. i think that the difference this time, perhaps compared with the last couple, was that very few people at the outset disputed the likely outcome. so, conservatives knew that their backs were against the wall and that they were highly likely to lose, and labour knew that they really ought to be winning. if what can happen between �*19 and �*211 can and did happen, then we'd be mugs to predict what could happen between �*211 and �*28, �*29, whenever

the next election comes.

live from london, this is bbc news. a rocket attack on israeli occupied golan heights has killed at least twelve people, including teenagers playing football. venezuela is heading to the polls in a few hours time in what's being seen as a pivotal presidential election. new video has emerged of the events leading up to a police officer kicking a man in the head as he lay on the floor at manchester airport last week. and it's day two of the paris olympics as organisers cancel triathalon training due

to pollution in the river seine. hello, i'm nicky schiller. we start this hour in the middle east. israel has pledged to respond to a rocket attack in the israeli occupied golan heights, in which at least 12 people were killed. most of the casualties were teenagers who were playing football in the town of majdal shams. israel has blamed lebanon's hezbollah movement. it has denied responsibility. the israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu is cutting short his visit to the us and has warned hezbollah will pay a heavy price. translation: since 1 was. updated about the disaster, i have been holding continuous security consultations, and i have directed that our return to israel be brought forward. as soon as i arrive, i will immediately convene the security cabinet. i can say that the state of israel will not let this pass in silence.