Read on Twitter
🧵 6 years ago today, I was carrying out a few last minute tasks as part of @jeremycorbyn’s #GE2017 social media team before hunkering down at Southside, Victoria Street (Labour HQ) waiting for the exit poll, with a strange sense of euphoria. (1/7) 
Just a few weeks earlier, we’d been 20-25 points down in the polls & hadn’t been given a chance. The Tories (& some on our own side, it seems) we’re rubbing their hands at the thought of teaching us socialist oiks a lesson, to prise our hands off the levers of power. (2/7)
Except it didn’t quite work out like that. Week after week of that election campaign, we drew the Tories closer. The excitement of eating into their lead was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. We were turning the tables & making people eat their words. (3/7)
And then the roar as the exit poll broke, and the first results came in and that strange mixture, for the rest of the night and morning, of pride and disappointment in equal measure. Next door, where the permanent staff sat around screens, deathly quiet, a sense of shock. (4/7)
It was only months & years later we realised that we’d been swimming against a tide down there in Victoria Street. That those people had actively been sabotaging the election, while we had been expending every drop of energy we had for the cause. (5/7)
But at the time, none of that mattered. There was a sense of pride, not just amongst the people in Corbyn’s team, in that building, but in the fact that we’d brought in & reflected a much wider movement outside, and this was theirs, to savour. (6/7)
People will say it wasn’t a win. That we lost. We know that, of course we do. And to be so close was agonising, partly because we knew the impact that this loss would have. But what couldn’t be taken away, was that we’d made history, all of us. Heady days, indeed. ✊ (7/7)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
