Just after midnight we met up with and asked Tommy Sheppard what he thought about the accuracy of the exit poll predicting 55 seats for the SNP, which might well mean a clean sweep in Edinburgh.
A veteran of three General Elections now he replied cautiously : “Well, if we believe it, you know, it’s just a poll I appreciate we have to do a lot of idle speculation while we’re waiting for the real results. But it is just one poll, it’s a big poll, I have to say it’s out of sync with most of the other polls during the campaign.
“And it’s out of sync with our own data that we’ve been collecting during the campaign about voter intention. This would be a level of achievement that we would never have predicted to be honest. For us winning the election means getting a majority of the seats we’re contesting and that means anything north of 30 is a win.
“So I’ll be happy with that. If we get into these sorts of figures, it’s going to be really quite a remarkable result.”
The Edinburgh Reporter suggested Sheppard’s own seat was pretty safe. He replied : “We’ve got a better ring team now. We’ve had a look at the postal votes when they were being sorted. So we get we’ve got an idea of sort of from the sampling as to what’s happening there it looks as if we have won the postal votes, which is something we’ve never managed to do before actually. So that would suggest things are going to be all right in Edinburgh East but we had better not count chickens!”
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
