THROUGHOUT the campaign, politicians of all colours across the North-East reported that “something funny was going on” within the electorate that they couldn’t put their finger on.

The exit poll and the first results last night proved them absolutely right.

The great story of the 2010 campaign was Cleggmania – the surge in the Liberal Democrat performance following the first two televised Leaders’ Debates, but that appeared not to be borne out in either the exit poll or the first three results from Sunderland.

The exit poll showed the Lib Dems standing still and the Conservatives gaining a mild swing of 5.5 per cent and falling 19 seats short of an overall majority. With that sort of swing, no seat in the North-East would have changed hands – not even City of Durham, which seemed a nailed-on certainty for the Lib Dems.

The results from Sunderland – in what was traditionally the most staunch of Labour areas – continued that baffling picture.

The first two results – from the Houghton and Washington seats – showed an enormous swing from Labour to Conservative, nearly ten per cent. And this in an area of the country which David Cameron had highlighted as having an “unsustainable”

level of public spending, a hint perhaps at job losses to come.

On such a swing, the Tories were marching into Downing Street, sweeping the traditional North-East marginals of Stockton South and Tynemouth, plus Middlesbrough South and even knocking on the door in Darlington.

But then came Sunderland Central. This was Cameron’s “wild card”, the seat where the party had put in a surprising resource as it sought a totemic win. When the boundaries were drawn up, of the seat’s nine council wards, five had elected Conservative councillors, and the party chose Lee Martin, its youthful and characterful group leader, as its candidate.

Yet in this seat, where the swing really mattered, it was only 4.8 per cent from Labour to Conservative – not enough for Mr Cameron’s party to pick up even the most marginal Tynemouth, where he required a 5.7 per cent swing.

And the Lib Dems, after all the fuss about Cleggmania, were still standing still.

Turnout in Sunderland was up, by nearly ten per cent – so much that it took a tardy 49 minutes to count the vote, way behind 2001’s record 41 minutes.

But that turnout – 57 per cent in Sunderland Central – indicated a second great political story of the night.

Reports were coming in of people being turned away from polling stations across the country, unable to vote when the 10pm deadline passed.

An anecdote from Newcastle suggested 400 were queueing when the doors closed; another tale from elsewhere said a polling booth had run out of voting papers.

The organisation of the election appeared as baffling as the voting intentions of the great British public.