A count and a coup
I'm in the office preparing for this lunchtime's Inside Politics. We have Kate Hoey on the attempted coup against Gordon Brown in London, and the Alliance General Secretary, Gerry Lynch, who is a respected tallyman, on the prospects for the count at the King's Hall tomorrow. I shall also be joined by the former lagan valley MLA Seamus Close and the Sunday World's Roisin Gorman.
Over the weekend the parties have been crunching their figures. In the south the have a long and distinguished history of calling elections ahead of time. Here it's sometimes a more haphazard operation, although Alliance in particular has great expertise in the area.
Tallying means looking over the shoulders of the election workers checking the ballot papers and noting down as many first preferences as you can. The party activists don't see all the papers, and as they are by definition partisan there is an understandable tendency for them to look out for their own first preferences and to concentrate on their own areas. That's why tallies tend to be biased towards those who take them.
But putting all those cayeats in place, it's clear that Sinn Fein has topped the poll handsomely, Jim Allister has gouged a big bite out of the DUP vote and Jim Nicholson has held his position better than many might have predicted. The SDLP now appear to be conceding that they won't be able to grab a seat from the fragmented unionists.
One UCUNF tally I was given yesterday was as follows:
Sinn Fein 26.5% 130,000 votes
UCUNF 18.5% 91,000 votes
DUP 16.9% 84,000 votes
SDLP 15.1% 75,000 votes
TUV 14% 70,000 votes
Alliance 5% 25,000 votes
Greens 3% 15,000 votes
i haven't had such a detailed read out from the somewhat deflated looking DUP officials but when I was last talking to them they maintained they were in the lead of the unionist pack on around 18 - 20% to the UUP's 16% and the TUV's 14%.
There were interesting stories about individual constituencies. UCUNF maintained that Jim Allister had won out in North Antrim, although the DUP in North Antrim denied this. UCUNF also said Jim Nicholson had clearly won DUP seats like Lagan Valley and Upper Bann.
The Westminster expenses story and doubts about Diane Dodds' TV performances (most notably the last Politics Show debate) clearly played into the DUP reversal. As the dominant party in the Executive they were also always going to be in line to be hit by a protest vote (quite a turn around for a party founded on protest).
However I think one of the most important factors is that this was the first election since the DUP did its deal with Sinn Fein. They were always going to lose a section of their "never, never, never" support base. If he has got anything like 70,000 votes Jim Allister will have built massively on the 10,452 votes garnered by Bob McCartney in the 2007 Assembly elections. Indeed he will have more or less replicated his party's showing in the Dromore by-election where Keith Harbinson got 27% of the unionist vote.
UPDATE: As the Alliance General Secretary Gerry Lynch just explained on Inside Politics, tallying is harder in European elections than other counts because, during the verification process, the election workers keep the ballot papers face down. So party activists are trying to spot "1s" for their candidate by peering through to the other side of the paper.
Kate Hoey told us she backs Alan Johnson, but isn't convinced now is the right time for Gordon Brown to step down. She also ruled herself out of the election for Speaker and scotched some rumours about the possibility of her returning to Northern Ireland to hook up with the DUP.
On the newswires the Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan has just said that bringing forward a Dail election would be "catastrophic". Now doesn't that remind you of another political leader who recently argued that an early election would bring "chaos".
I'm 
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