JONATHAN Shaw was returned for a third time as Labour’s MP for Chatham and Aylesford after hours of frustration and anxiety.

His supporters gave a rousing cheer when at 5.10am he bucked the trend and held on to a sizeable margin over the Tories.

His 2,332 majority was against the trend in the Medway Towns where recounts had been called in the other constituencies by the Conservatives.

But it took over seven hours for the Chatham and Aylesford votes to be sorted. They were mixed in with County Council votes. Then the tellers had to count the Parliamentary votes.

Campaigners for the three main parties had thought it would be a lot closer.

The Liberal Democrats candidate, Debbie Enever, increased their standing with nearly 6,000 votes.

But there was considerable disappointment in Tory ranks as the count dragged into the early hours. It became increasingly evident that their candidate, Anne Jobson, could not win the seat, though she did recover more ground lost in 1997, halving the 2001 Labour majority.

It had started in the New Year with an internal constituency party battle to unseat her as the candidate. But it was not enough.

Labour supporters said Mr Shaw’s personal standing as a constituency MP had helped him to withold the pressure of four opponents.

The five-sided battle saw UKIP’s Jeffrey King increase his party’s vote by a small margin, while the English Democrats - fighting in Medway for the first time since they were formed in 2003 - collect 668 votes.

Their candidate, Mike Russell, forecast that in five years time he would be taking over the seat from the Labour backbencher.

All the candidates agreed the battle to represent the constituency had been a clean one. But Mr Shaw did not count his chickens until the eggs hatched.

As the night dragged on, he said: "I really don’t know how it will go. Some of the ballot boxes are very favourable, others are not."

Mrs Jobson, who rushed home with her mother and mother-in-law to shower after the ballots closed, was equally reluctant to forecast the result.