Despite every poll for more than a year suggesting Keir Starmer would end up in No 10, they worried that something would go wrong.
For some, it was the ghost of 1992, when the polls predicted that Neil Kinnock was on course to take power, but in the end John Major's Conservatives clung on. For others, it was their fear that after 14 years in opposition, Labour had lost the ability to win.
After all, in the last 100 years only three Labour leaders have ever won elections - Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair - and the last of those was almost 20 years ago. No opposition leader has ever flipped a landslide defeat into a majority in a single term. Yet with the exit polls indicating an overwhelming Labour victory, perhaps the doubtful can rest easy.
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