| ROCHESTER AND STROOD | UKIP gain | ||
| Mark Reckless UKIP | 16,867 | 42.1% | (+42.1%) |
| Kelly Tolhurst Conservatives | 13,947 | 34.8% | (-14.4%) |
| Naushabah Khan Labour | 6,713 | 16.8% | (-11.7%) |
| Clive Gregory Green | 1,692 | 4.2% | (+2.7%) |
| Geoff Juby Lib Dems | 349 | 0.8% | (-15.4%) |
| Others | 497 | 1.2% | (-3.3%) |
UKIP gained its second MP in just over a month after Mark Reckless easily won back the Rochester and Strood seat which he had previously held for the Conservatives.
Mr Reckless polled 16,867 votes (42.1%) for a majority of almost 3,000 over the Tories' replacement candidate Kelly Tolhurst.
Labour, meanwhile, finished down in third having achieved the seemingly impossible by becoming the main story on a night Prime Minister David Cameron's party lost again to the insurgent UKIP.
For, just as the polls closed in the Kent constituency, shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry was forced to resign at the behest of her leader Ed Miliband.
Earlier in the day, Ms Thornberry had tweeted a picture of a modern terraced house adorned with St George's flags in the window. A white Ford Transit van was parked outside.
Her caption simply read - "Image from Rochester" - and, at first, the Labour press office and Islington South MP saw fit to defend the photograph.
But that line of thinking did not last long.
Mr Miliband, whose leadership has come under serious scrutiny in recent weeks, was clearly terrified at the prospect of snobbish inferences being drawn from the photo. Indeed, his assessment today of the picture was that it "conveyed a sense of disrespect".
He added: "I was angry because I thought her tweet gave a misleading impression, when she photographed the house in which the family lived, that somehow Labour had the wrong view of that family."
The damage, though, was already done. The Sun newspaper had picked up on the tweet and headlined today's front page: "Here for the Sneers".
It was a monumental Labour own goal but the Conservatives hardly had anything to crow about either.
Following Douglas Carswell's defection and subsequent re-election as a UKIP MP in Clacton last month, Conservative Central Office made it clear the party was going to do everything it could to prevent a repeat.
Mr Cameron himself visited the constituency on five separate occasions, and he ordered each of his MPs to make at least three separate trips.
But the feeling is that, whatever the Prime Minister tried, it would not have worked due to the prevailing political weather.
First, the European Union sent Britain a bill of £1.7billion after growth in the UK economy had been recalculated to take into account prostitution and drugs.
Then, a couple of days later, there was chaos in the House of Commons when the motion for a debate intended to be about the European Arrest Warrant made no mention of it at all.
Instead, MPs were offered a vote on just 11 of 35 European justice measures which did not include the arrest warrant. It was as if UKIP was writing the news agenda themselves.
Nevertheless, at target seat number 270, this was still a seriously impressive victory for Nigel Farage's party and, unsurprisingly, the UKIP leader was in a bullish mood, predicting more gains in the general election next May.
There, Mr Farage hopes his party will hold the balance of power - and he has said he will do a "deal with the devil" for an in-out EU referendum.
For now, though, it remains unclear with exactly whom that deal will be.
The electoral maths are generally unfavourable for the Conservatives - but Mr Miliband has recently recorded the worst personal rating of any leader since records began, and the Labour poll lead has just about vanished.
Adding an extra layer of unpredictability ahead of the general election is the continuing collapse of the Liberal Democrats.
In Rochester, there were even rumours of the party being beaten by the Monster Raving Loony Party and humiliated by dominatrix Charlotte Rose who was standing as an independent.
But, while those rumours proved false, the Lib Dem candidate Geoff Juby finished comfortably behind the Greens on just 0.8% of the vote.
It all means that, unless the Lib Dems retain a core support in just about all of the areas where they still hold seats in 2015, then a coalition of Nick Clegg's party plus either the Conservatives or Labour may not be mathematically viable.
Yes, indeed - our glorious First Past the Post system, which is meant to produce strong majority governments, could instead end up delivering a three-party coalition.
And so, for now, the only thing which is certain is uncertainty.
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