Norwich North byelection results – live

8.53am: Turnout was 45%. That's the first fact of the day. I was on the 6am train from Liverpool Street and I'm now sitting in a marquee in the Royal Norfolk Showground where the Norwich North count will be taking place. They start at 9am and the result is due between 11.30am and 1pm.

I haven't found anyone who doesn't expect the Conservative Chloe Smith to win, but the Tories are doing their best to stamp on all expectations. "It's going to be very tight. The turnout was very low and it's going to be a struggle, particularly with the smaller parties picking up votes from the major parties," said a party source.

In 2005 Labour's Ian Gibson won the seat with a majority of 5,459 with a 61% turnout. A 45% turnout is low, but not appallingly low. I sense that the Tories are laying the caution on a bit thick.

9.19am: Here's what they're saying in the Labour camp. These comments are from someone on the campaign team.

The Tories are going round desperately trying to downplay expectations, but we don't think anyone's fooled. The turnout may by 45%, but it wasn't 45% in our areas. I went out yesterday, in a polling district with about 2,400 voters, and by 9.40pm only around 600 had turned out. Our voters have just stayed at home, partly because of MPs' expenses and partly because of Gibo [Ian Gibson – many Norwich North voters thought Labour was being unfair when it banned him from standing as a candidate at the next election, triggering his decision to cause a byelection]. We're in a race for second place with the Lib Dems.

9.30am: They've started counting now (or, rather, verifying the vote, which is the first step in the process). Theresa May, the shadow work and pensions secretary who was running the Tory campaign, and the Mid Norfolk Tory MP Keith Simpson are the only MPs I've seen here so far.

The Lib Dems don't seem very optimistic. I've just heard their opening spiel, from someone on the campaign, and it suggests they're already trying to put a brave face on coming third.

This was always a difficult seat for us. We started in third place. For Labour even to come second would be a terrible result for. And if the Greens get anything less than 15% it will be a disaster for them, given that they were talking about winning the seat.

9.40am: In the comments section NeitherLeftNorRight has written:

I do not think the conservatives are overdoing their caution, as the vote counting seems to have been delayed from the usual eve after to the next day owing to an unusually high number of postal votes. Labour SEEM (there is no statiscally significant body of evidence I think) to get a disproportionate amount of postal votes in tight seats.

Actually, according to Broadland council, which is organising the count, there are other reasons why the count is taking place on a Friday morning. This is the explanation from Colin Bland, the council chief executive, as reported in the Eastern Daily Press.

The overwhelming imperative at any election is that the count should be transparent and accurate. One of the reasons that we count next day is the increasing number of voters choosing to vote by post. After the last general election new measures were introduced to try to eliminate election fraud. This means that when voters register for a postal vote we collect their date of birth and signature. Once we have received their postal vote we have to check their signature and date of birth against our records to verify their right to vote. This is a painstaking process and takes time. There are 7,991 postal votes in the Broadland for this constituency. Some people do take their postal votes to the polling stations and these have to be returned to the relevant council for checking after the polling stations close. Norwich North is a split constituency, so two councils are involved in the verification of postal votes. Avoiding an overnight count also means people counting the votes are fresh and less likely to make mistakes. There is a cost saving too and we always have to be mindful of providing value for money for public funds.

9.44am: The word is that we'll get the result nearer 11.30 than 1.

9.53am: Mike Smithson at PoliticalBetting reckons that a 45% turnout is good for the Tories.

The general theory of low turnouts is that the campaigns which benefit most are those that are best organised. They're the ones to have been more likely to have got their vote out and the party with the best GOTV (Get Out The Vote) operation there yesterday was the Tory one. So as well as being a certain winner on my turnout below 61% bet I'm pretty confident that my "Tories on more than 41%" bet is going to be profitable too.

10.09am: The Green party seems reconciled to fourth place. This is what a party spokesman told me:

The level of campaigning activity from a very small resource base has been very good. On the ground we had something like £12,000 to spend, compared to the £100,000 that the Tories have apparently spent. We are very pleased with the level of interest we've generated. We've picked up new members and new supporters. We think there's a chance that we will beat our best byelection performance [in terms of share of the vote] when we got 7.4% in Haltemprice and Howden [the David Davis byelection, in 2008].

10.19am: They've finished verifying the votes. We've just been told the precise turnout: 45.88%.

10.24am: There's not much urgency here. The counters have stopped for a tea break!

10.46am: Labour are saying that the Tory share of the vote is up "but not by much". The party has got some provisional numbers, but I can't find anyone yet who will tell me what they are they are. All they will say is that their vote (45% in 2005) is definitely down and that the Tories (who were on 33% last time) has increased, but not dramatically. Last year, in Crewe and Nantwich, the Tories went up from 33% in 2005 to 49% in the byelection.

10.58am: The Tories won't discuss the figures they've got. (By now the parties have got a provisional sense of what the share of the vote is, based on what their agents have seen on the papers coming out of the ballot boxes). One Tory said it was impossible to say whether Labour or the Lib Dems would come second. Another told me that the Greens and Ukip were doing well. It's starting to feel as if the Tories will win but by a relatively modest margin.

11.03am: On the subject of the battle between Labour and the Lib Dems, I found this wonderful line in one of the Labour party's election leaflets in Norwich North.

Today's Lib Dems are not the party they were under Charles Kennedy. They have no principles or values.

That's Labour trying to protect the progressive, lefty vote. But I don't remember them saying that about Charles Kennedy when he was leading the Lib Dems.

11.11am: There are some other Norwich North live blogs on the go.

This is from the one that Jonathan Isaby is writing at ConservativeHome:

The consenus is that the Conservatives have won, although with turnout said to be 45% and the fringe parties reportedly doing well, the majority will not be of Crewe and Nantwich proportions. ConHome readers' average prediction was 3,301, and Political Betting readers were in the same ball park.

This is from Iain Dale's Norwich North blog:

UKIP reported to be getting lots of votes in the city wards in Norwich North. LibDems not doing as well in the Broadland wards as expected.

And this is from Daniel Finkelstein's Norwich North blog at Comment Central.

So with the turnout known, we can do some maths. If Norwich swung to represent the average national opinion poll, the Conservatives would only just squeeze out Labour. They would get 11k to Labour's 10k.
But if the by-election result looked more like the local election result the Tories would get 12k to Labour's 5.5k.My guess is somewhere at the top of this range. With the Tory "tight" claim making me only a very teensy bit nervous of this prediction.

11.14am: Chloe Smith, the Conservative candidate, will be here in five minutes, I'm told.

11.18am: Chloe Smith has arrived. Her jacket is "shocking pink", a colleague tells me. Opinion about it at my press table seem to be mixed. Still, I'm sure that's not going to stop her becoming the MP for Norwich North - and probably rising very far in the Conservative party. She's 27, she's remarkably able and, with David Cameron committed to getting a decent number of women into his government, she now has a good chance of becoming a minister before she hits 30.

But that may not work to her advantage. Andy McSmith wrote a good profile of her in the Independent yesterday and it included this line.

"In the Cameron sense, she gets it," one Conservative who knows Ms Smith well said. "She's the ideal candidate for this kind of situation – very sharp, very young. I just hope that David Cameron doesn't over-promote her. The dreadful thing that I fear Cameron will do is push her straight into some role where she is out of her depth for the sake of the party's profile. I rated Theresa Villiers very highly, but I don't think getting on to Shadow Cabinet so quickly did her any good. And I only have to say the words 'Jacqui Smith'... It would be better for Chloe to be left on the back benches for five years."

11.44am: Chris Ostrowski, the Labour candidate, will not be here today because he's still at home recovering from swine flu but his wife, Katie, is representing him and she's just arrived.

She has already been playing a role in the campaign since Chris fell ill on Tuesday. When I was here on Wednesday the Labour party was handing out a leaflet from her, in her own handwriting, urging people to support her husband.

She said:

Chris is not a career politician …

There's no danger of that changing today.

Another interesting thing about it is that in the letter, that covered two pages of notepaper, Katie did not Chris mention Labour at all. The only clue as to which party her husband represented was the smallprint at the bottom saying that the leaflet was published by the Labour party.

11.45am: Labour has come second, on with 19.5% of the vote, according to the conversation I've just overheard. It was a Labour activist calling someone on his mobile.

11.48am: If that figure is true, and if the Tory vote really has just gone up marginally (say, to 36%, from 33% in 2005), then the Tories have taken the seat with a 14% swing. That would be respectable by any standards, even if the actual majority turns out to be relatively low.

11.54am: The Lib Dems seem to accept that they are in third place. One source told me that their share of the vote as much the same as it was in 2005, 16%. But he was also telling me that the Tories were doing badly because they had got less than 40%. He thinks that they're up by about six points, ie to 39%.

11.57am: We're expecting the result now between 12.15 and 12.30.

12.02pm: If the figures I've been given are correct, the Tories are on course for a majority of around 6,700. That seems very high and I may well have mucked up my maths. We'll know for certain very soon.

12.13pm: The Tories think my figures are way off. "More like 4,000, perhaps between 1,000 and 2,000," said a source when I asked about the size of the Conservative majority.

12.15pm: But a hack colleague has told me that the figures produced by the parties are less reliable than normal because Broadland council has limited the number of party agents allowed to observe the count. Apparently that's because they did not want too many BNP figures floating around.

12.18pm: The Tories say that Norwich North is 162nd on the party's list of target seats. If the party were win here at the general election, David Cameron would be on course for a majority of around 100. The MP who is 161st on the Tory target list is Alistair Darling.

12.23pm: Apparently the parties are also finding it hard to assess the results because the bundles of votes aren't being stacked up in piles party by party in the way that they normally are at counts like this.

12.26pm: The Tory figure I mentioned earlier - Norwich North being 162nd on the list of target seats at the next election - is based on boundary changes that will come into force at the general election and which will make the seat harder for the Tories to win. This byelection is being fought on the 2005 boundaries, which are more pro-Tory, so the 162nd figure is not strictly relevant. When the boundaries change, the Tories will lose about 1,500 voters.

12.30pm: Nick Robinson has written a jolly blog explaining how you should interpret the spin the political parties will put on the result, which we should be getting any minute now.

12.36pm: There's been speculation about Ukip beating the Greens. But the Tories tell me that the Greens are in fourth place, with Ukip behind them.

12.39pm: The broadcasters have been told that David Cameron is definitely coming up to Norwich to do a lap of victory at some point this afternoon.

12.45pm: The agents have been summoned. The returning officer is about to give them the result.

12.45pm: I've just had one of those very peculiar conversations with a Tory spin doctor who's in London. "Well, officially we're still saying it's very tight," he said. I could hear him smirking.

It sounds as if David Cameron is about to renew his demand for an immediate general election.

12.48pm: The candidates are coming up to the stage now.

12.50pm: The Tories have won by around 7,000!

12.51pm: Here are the key figures:

Conservatives: 13,591

Labour: 6,243

Lib Dems: 4,803

12.54pm: Ukip beat the Green and were only around 700 votes behind the Lib Dems

12.55pm: Chloe Smith is speaking. She starts with best wishes to Chris Ostrowski. And she pays tribute to Ian Gibson, saying she will represent the consituency with "the same honesty and conviction" that he did. She mentions the contract she offered to the voters. If she does not keep her promises, the voters should kick her out, she says.

The voters have voted for change. People have not just voted against Labour. They have voted for the Conservative party, she says.

It's now the Conservative agenda that is setting the pace in national politics, she says.

But local issues matter too. Smith mentions various local campaigns she will champion.

It will be an honour to serve Norwich North. "I will not let you down."

12.58pm: Katie Ostrowski, the wife of the Labour candidate, is speaking now. She thanks NHS Direct for the advice it gave when he collapsed and for the ambulance and hospital staff who looked after him. And she thanks all those who sent messages of support after Chris fell ill, including the prime minister.

"I can assure you that's not the last you've heard of Chris Ostrowski," she says.

1.01pm: April Pond, the Lib Dem candidate, says this has been a "disastrous result for Labour".

1.08pm: Here are the full results now, from the Press Association:

Chloe Smith (C) 13,591 (39.54%, +6.29%)
Chris Ostrowski (Lab) 6,243 (18.16%, -26.70%)
April Pond (LD) 4,803 (13.97%, -2.22%)
Glenn Tingle (UKIP) 4,068 (11.83%, +9.45%)
Rupert Read (Green) 3,350 (9.74%, +7.08%)
Craig Murray (Honest) 953 (2.77%)
Robert West (BNP) 941 (2.74%)
Bill Holden (Ind) 166 (0.48%, -0.17%)
Howling Laud (Loony) 144 (0.42%)
Anne Fryatt (NOTA) 59 (0.17%)
Thomas Burridge (Libertarian) 36 (0.10%)
Peter Baggs (Ind) 23 (0.07%)
C maj 7,348 (21.37%)
16.49% swing Lab to C
Electorate 75,124; Turnout 34,377 (45.76%, -15.33%)
2005: Lab maj 5,459 (11.61%) - Turnout 47,033 (61.09%)
Gibson (Lab) 21,097 (44.86%); Tumbridge (C) 15,638 (33.25%); Whitmore
(LD) 7,616 (16.19%); Holmes (Green) 1,252 (2.66%); Youles (UKIP)
1,122 (2.39%); Holden (Ind) 308 (0.65%)

1.09pm: The Ukip candidate, Glenn Tingle, said in his speech that the result showed that Ukip was now the fourth party in British politics.

Rupert Read, the Green candidate, gave the most substantial speech from the platform. He thanked the Labour, Ukip and Conservative candidates for signing the "clean campaigning" pledge championed by the Greens and had a dig at the Lib Dems for not supporting it.

It seems to us that dirty politics is exactly what the electorate do not want. Any party that campaigns dirty has no credible agenda of cleaning up politics.

Read also said that Ukip and the Greens were the only parties in the byelection that actually gained votes. That showed that Britain was entering "a new era of true multi-party politics", he said.

Read feels strongly about clean campaiginng because the Lib Dems issued an election leaflet quoting this sentence from a letter Read wrote to the Independent after the 7/7 bombings in 2005: "We in Britain have quite simply had this coming." The headline on the leaflet said: "Does he speak for you?"

Read may also have a point about multi-party politics. Between them, Ukip and the Greens got more than Labour.

1.53pm: Just some final thoughts:

1. The Tory candidate who came second in 2005 got more than 2,000 votes than Chloe Smith needed to win today. This is not like Crewe and Nantwich, where the Tories collected 6,000 more votes than they did at the general election.

2. That said, a majority of 7,348 is significant by any standards and, at 16.5%, the swing from Labour to Conservative is pretty good too. At Crewe and Nantwich the swing to the Tories was 17.6%. Some people argue that, in an election with a low turnout, swing is not relevant. I suspect that, if the turnout is low, it becomes even more relevant.

3. But swing is a concept that belongs to the era of two-party politics. Here the Lib Dems, Ukip and the Greens all came within 1,500 votes of each other. Rupert Read's point about this being an era of multi-party politics is a good one.

4. The MPs' expenses scandal may have depressed turnout. But, even in an election with a low turnout, someone's got to win. Smith showed that that the main parties can win elections in this anti-politician environment if their candidates adopt the right stance.

5. Labour is right to say that there was an Ian Gibson factor here. Voters were angry about his treatment. But it was the Labour party that was to blame for this. Labour may need to reconsider the way it conducts its internal politics.

That's it. I'm finished now. Thanks for all the comments.

6.53pm: Rupert Read has sent me an email about the quote from his letter about 7/7 used in the Lib Dem leaflet.

One important correction, that I would be grateful if you would make: the 'sentence' you quote from me, "We in Britain have quite simply had this coming" is of course nothing I ever wrote. It is a butchered version of a much-longer sentence that I did write, that made the obvious common-sense point (made among others by MI5 since) that going to war illegally in the Middle East made us more vulnerable to non-state terrorism. The LibDems' deliberate butchering/misquotation of the sentence in question in order to make me sound like I was excusing or even applauding terrorism is one of the main extremely dirty campaign tactics that they employed against me, and they should not be allowed to get away with it.