Ross challenge failsto ignite the voters

Amid fears that a well-divided three way split among unionists could hand nationalists or republicans a shock victory, the main interest was in how Mr Ross, who once held the seat for the UUP, would perform in his bid to win back his old seat from the DUP man who took it from him.

Those observers who expected fireworks were left with a damp squib, as Mr Ross’s challenge simply failed to ignite.

The 73-year-old candidate, who is the TUV president, polled just 2,572 votes in the 2010 General Election, whereas his rival persuaded 12,097 voters to place their ‘X’ against his name.

Only Alliance’s Bernard Fitzpatrick, with 1,922 votes, polled worse than Mr Ross who once held the seat for the Ulster Unionist Party for nearly three decades.

To chants of ‘easy, easy’ from some supporters, Mr Campbell spoke of his delight at winning the seat again for the third time. While not easy, his victory had certainly been very comfortable indeed, though the victor was at pains to stress that he was never complacent, never saw the outcome as a foregone conclusion, and always worked hard for every vote.

The newly re-elected MP also paid tribute to “some” of his opponents, saying not all of them had fought a clean contest.

He also hit out at the terrorists who launched an attack on the count centre at Templemore sports complex on the outskirts of Londonderry. The alert forced the evacuation of the count centre for a short time, and people inside the building were unable to leave by the front exit or collect cars until shortly before 6am as Army Technical Officers dealt with a device placed in a taxi that had been hijacked and the driver forced to take it to the count centre, where it was left in the car park.

While questions were asked by a number of people at the centre about the security arrangements that had not anticipated such an event, and in a venue just a couple of miles from the border with Donegal, there were also some mutterings about whether Templemore sports complex should be used again for counting the contents of the ballot boxes.

From those on the platform, the anger was directed fairly and squarely at the terrorists.

Thanking the security services, Mr Campbell said: “Those who tried tonight to stop this count failed, just as those who tried 30 years ago did the same.”

Insisting that they would never win, Mr Campbell added, to cheers from supporters: “If they try again tomorrow, they will fail again tomorrow.”

Speaking to reporters afterwards, the East Londonderry MP was visibly delighted at the way he had swatted away the TUV challenge.

“I think it’s a fantastic result,” he said. “Two and a half thousand votes is pretty derisory when you look at the size of the constituency and at the unionist electorate in the constituency.”

Mr Campbell said the figures spoke for themselves.

"When you look at our share of the vote five years ago we got 42% of the vote when there were only two unionist candidates in the race.

"This time we had a TUV candidate who was a former MP who many people said would take 40% of the share of the vote that I took.

"They didn't even take half of that, and we almost got the share of the vote that we got five years ago.

"So it's a fantastic performance, a tribute to all those 12,000-odd people who voted for me, and of course the tremendous team who facilitated that victory," he said.

Asked why he thought he had won so decisively, Mr Campbell said the party earns support by working “aggressively” on the ground, working hard to win every single vote possible and by never taking anything for granted.

While the media tried to lure the senior DUP politician into saying whether he would stand for the party leadership in the event of Peter Robinson standing down following his surprise defeat to Alliance’s Naomi Long, Mr Campbell refused to rise to the bait.

He repeated a number of times; “There is no vacancy.”

He also described Mr Robinson as having “served this party fantastically well for decades” and insisted: “Peter Robinson is the leader, is a superb leader. He is not resigning and we simply have to look at the reality of why he lost his seat. We go forward as a united party.”

With the DUP vote holding up well in general, Mr Campbell said his party could have some influence on the new Parliament, whereas the UUP’s decision to hitch itself so closely to the Conservative party’s bandwagon had backfired.

"There will be DUP leverage in the next Parliament and there will be an open door at 10 Downing Street and we will hear what either David Cameron or Gordon Brown has to say to us. Those who hitched on to the Conservative Party trailer have crashed", he said.

William Ross was defiant despite suffering such a heavy defeat.

In his speech after the declaration, he insisted: “We are here, we’re staying, we’ll be back next year in a different election, in different circumstances, and we will have a different result.”

In the end, the closest challenger to Mr Campbell was Sinn Fein's Cathal O hOisin who finished second with 6,742 votes.