GE2017: Why so little changed so much

It's certainly been an epic drama.

And yet the net effect here in the Midlands, with its famous clusters of 'marginal' seats is that the Conservatives have one more seat than they did before and Labour have one fewer.

Our famous 'swing seats' simply didn't swing.

But it is by changing so little that our part of the country has changed so much, helping to put paid to all that talk of a Conservative majority.

Yes, the Conservatives won seats from Labour in the biggest Leave-supporting areas, Walsall North and Stoke South.

Jack Brereton became the first Tory MP in Stoke-on-Trent South for more than 80 years

But their efforts to shift the front line of the electoral battle into the biggest cities backfired spectacularly.

Labour strengthened in Coventry, Wolverhampton and Birmingham.

I was at the count in Birmingham Edgbaston where the Conservatives needed a three-and-a half percent swing, a basic prerequisite for that 'stronger hand' Theresa May once talked about.

But there, as elsewhere, it was Labour who did best out of the ex-UKIP vote and the shrinkage of the Liberal Democrats.

Now UKIP face an existential crisis here.

While the Liberal Democrats may have come within 2,500 of the Conservatives in Cheltenham, in their two other former seats, Birmingham Yardley and Solihull, they trailed badly into third place: perhaps they may now have to think of going back to their old style of 'pavement politics.'