General Election 2019: East and West Midlands Analysis
10:30PM Exit Poll analysis by ITV News Central Political Correspondent:
The Exit Poll was astonishing moment.
Not only has it projected a huge win for Boris Johnson's Conservative Party, but it implies an absolute landslide in England, and the Midlands in particular.
If this is anywhere close to being right, Labour will have lost former rock-solid safe seats in Coventry, Stoke On Trent, Birmingham, the Black Country and across the East Midlands coalfields. Right now, at 11pm it's hard to think of many Labour candidates in the Midlands who can feel safe.
With the SNP doing well in Scotland, and Labour putting up a much better fight in the south and around London, we could wake up in the morning with the Midlands being the True Blue Tory capital of the UK; something which would have been unthinkable around ten years ago.
The first Midlands result due will be Nuneaton, which will be a safe Conservative hold. The thing to look out for, will be the turnout and the scale of the win. That might give us a clue to how bad a night this could be for Labour in the Midlands.
Counting well underway at the count for Warwick and Leamington.
We got the reaction from some local politicians in the first of our #60SecElec election specials.
The Lib Dem candidate for Bromsgrove, Dr David Nicholl, says the campaign has been "sad overall" and people are "fed up with politics"
02:30AM Update from ITV News Central Political Correspondent:
The Midlands results are starting to come in now, and things are just as good for the Conservatives as the Exit Poll was suggesting.
As expected, they have gained Peterborough but even in defeat they have huge cause for encouragement. Although Labour held Keith Vaz's seat in Leicester East, the Tories slashed the majority from 22,000 to just 6,000, with a huge swing.
The Conservatives also held onto Remain-voting Rushcliffe - Ken Clarke's old seat - where the Remain vote was split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
West Midlands Analysis:
The first big casualty in the West Midlands is Emma Reynolds in Wolverhampton North East.
Seen as a rising star in the Labour Party, she was first elected in 2010 and served in Ed Miliband's shadow cabinet.
A critic of Jeremy Corbyn, she resigned from her role as shadow housing minister when he became leader and supported Owen Smith's attempt to topple Corbyn as leader in 2017.
The Labour vote has been steadily slipping in Wolverhampton over several years, but the swing to the Conservative tonight was astonishing; they took more than half of the vote.
Telford - Lucy Allen increases majority from 720 to 10,941:
For the last two elections, Telford was a super-marginal seat.
The constituency was created in 1997, and was Labour until 2015. Lucy Allen won it by a whisker for the Conservatives back then, and just about clung on in 2017
But something incredible has happened in this election. Lucy Allen has increased her majority from just 720 to an incredible 10,941. A Labour town until a few years ago is now a safe Conservative seat.
Defeat for Labour's Vernon Coaker in Nottinghamshire:
What is probably the first of a number of Labour defeats in Nottinghamshire has come in Gedling.The "great survivor" Vernon Coaker has finally been defeated. He first won the seat during the Tony Blair landslide in 1997 and has been targeted by the Conservatives in every election ever since.It has always been a close marginal, so tonight's result was no great surprise. But the scale of defeat is nothing like in line with the national Labour collapse, and the Conservative win was only a narrow one. Once again Gedling is a marginal constituency.
Broxtowe candidate Anna Soubry says she'll be "relieved to be out of politics"