Belated fact check corner: Liberal Democrats didn’t get just 80 votes in Castle Point

A small piece of fact checking for the records: if you were watching the general election results as they came in you may remember the apparently utterly calamitous result in Castle Point where the Lib Dems polled just 80 votes.

Or rather, that’s what the Returning Officer announced and what social media mocked.

But in fact he got it wrong. The correct result was a merely dismal 801 votes.

As some of the wiser heads pointed out at the time, the fact that Sereena Davey, the Lib Dem candidate, started talking to the Returning Officer straight away gave a hint of the wrongness.

But it’s a good example of how people – and the media – often aren’t that careful about checking a piece of evidence when it appears to give a lovely example to fit a bigger viewpoint which clearly is right.