I arrived in Manchester ready to head down to the Labour leadership announcement with Johanna Baxter, one of the candidates for the national executive committee (NEC). There was trepidation in the air throughout the whole conference zone, everyone waiting anxiously to find out who would be the next person to lead our party. We had all known for months exactly when and how this announcement would take place. Unfortunately, this was not quite the case with the NEC results.

We turned up to conference without knowing which day they would announce the results (not that we hadn’t tried hard to find out). While we enjoyed finding out that Ed Miliband was going to lead our party, and attending the Ed Balls campaign party (Johanna and I had both been very involved in his campaign), the rest of the evening consisted of trying to gather information from national policy forum candidates and party officials (including asking the current chair of the NEC) about what the process was for announcing the results. None of which let Johanna know when her votes would be published. (more…)