The final opinion survey before the good folk of Gorton and Denton toddled off to the polls put the three parties in a hope of winning neck and neck.
Opinium had both Labour and the Greens on 28 per cent, with Reform snapping at their heels, only a point behind in this south-east corner of Greater Manchester.
As the Tories were no-hopers, their leader, Kemi Badenoch, decided polling day was a good day to take her MPs on an awayday.
Keir Starmer must have been praying that maybe, just maybe, he could triumph.
But around 4 am, his worst nightmare came true – a Green win with Reform second and Labour trailing in third place in a seat they have held since 1931. Mr Starmer would rather the Monster Raving Loony had won.
Though had Sir Oink A-Lot done so, Speaker Lindsay Hoyle might have struggled over calling his name to speak. The PM is now being squeezed, not just by the right, but by the left, too. His Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, will be wondering if she needs to be nicer to migrants.
Gorton and Denton is a constituency just two years old when boundary changes married Gorton to Denton. It was previously held for three decades until 2017 by a giant of Labour Party politics, Gerald Kaufman, when it was Manchester Gorton. Gerald must be turning in his grave now that the Greens have it.
And by a healthy margin, too. All credit to plumber Hannah Spencer for turning a 13,000 Labour majority into a 4,400 Green one.
If she needs a second job when she gets to Westminster, the government could hire her to plug all those Whitehall leaks. Reform doubled its vote, Labour halved theirs, and the Tories lost three-quarters of their supporters and their deposit.
Labour MPs are now questioning whether Andy Burnham could have averted disaster had the PM not intervened to stop the popular Manchester Mayor from fighting this by-election.
Reform had the advantage of being new kids on the block, carrying no political baggage and leader Nigel Farage and his candidate Matt Goodwin sought to make this election a referendum on the PM’s performance.
Labour must recognise Gorton and Denton was a tale of two Manchesters before it's too late - Nigel Nelson | Getty Images
The Greens might be older kids, but look like new ones under the fresh and charismatic leadership of Zack Polanski, despite some crackpot ideas such as a world without borders and legalising crack.
Gorton and Denton is a tale of two Manchesters, chic cafes rubbing shoulders with shuttered shops. On the one hand, child poverty is twice the national average, and on the other, it is home to students and graduates who moved there for more affordable accommodation.
One side of the constituency is 83 percent working class white, while over in the other, four in 10 of the residents are Muslim.
The Greens' support for Gaza was a plus there. For those reasons, it is impossible to draw a national picture of the depth of Labour's misfortunes.
The unique assortment of communities also includes Levenshulme, and Burnage – once the home of Oasis’s Gallagher brothers.
Labour now needs to tell itself: don't look back in anger, and definitely, maybe the local, Welsh and Scottish elections won't be so bad.
The party has bounced back from such catastrophes before. The biggest by-election swing ever was in 1983 when Lib Dem Simon Hughes took London’s Bermondsey from Labour with a 44 per cent swing.
It was a rejection of Labour leader Michael Foot, and the leftie went down to a resounding defeat in the General Election later that year.
That paved the way for Neil Kinnock to take over. He laid the groundwork for Tony Blair’s New Labour – and the subsequent 1997 landslide victory.
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