As Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson prepared for their crucial leaders debate, they knew it was not just about how they performed under the spotlight that mattered. It was the hour or so after that counted just as much

Welcome to The Spin Room: it's the place where political careers can be made or broken and our political editor Paul Francis was locked in.

KMTV analysis of the Johnson v Corbyn TV debate

In a room which is in fact a TV studio, there’s the quiet hum of laptops and discreet conversations on mobile phones.

There are two large TV screens bearing the words “BBC Election 2019” and on one side of the room, which is bathed in a red glow, some purplish material draped untidily to create, presumably, a sense that we are sat in a more comfortable environment than we actually are.

Although the chairs - the kind you have at management conferences - we are sitting on are not.

A well-known TV correspondent is telling a colleague that he is “not enamoured of Maidstone...it is one long traffic jam.”

It’s taken some time to get here: security is super-tight and at first, the dreaded trawl through the list to check my credentials reveals that my name is not on the list. Security staff are polite but firm - I have to get in touch with someone from the press office.

Then there’s a voice: “Found it!” The security guard sounds about as relieved as I am. It takes a walk through a bewildering set of corridors to get here: The Spin Room, where journalists gather for the equivalent of the post football match analysis.

Only instead of disgruntled managers or over-the-moon strikers, there are - or will be - senior Labour and Conservative figures trying to persuade us that their man outfoxed the other.

This post debate event has become an integral part of the televised debates and the parties take them deadly seriously.

Parties send in their most persuasive envoys to make their case, with a mixture of charm and menace; political oil and water.

The journalists who will pore over every sentence, dissect every word, uttered by the two leaders.

One of the curious features of the spin room is that for the eight or so hours before the actual leaders’ debate, there are only journalists in it.

You get the sense that most are demob happy; this is the last big debate before polling day next Thursday and the conversations are not so much about the forthcoming leaders’ debate so much as what they are going to do at Christmas.

There’s certainly a feeling that the campaign has tested the endurance levels of even the hardiest correspondents - the fact that it is in mid-winter and the evenings are dark has been in contrast to the usually more benign weather we get in Spring.

I’ve just bumped into Alan McGuinness, a former Medway Messenger reporter who now works for Sky. His guess is that the Conservatives will win with a small working majority. I’m inclined to agree.

It's a view backed by the results of a snap viewers' poll after the screening, which gave the Prime Minister a narrow 52/48 lead - we've seen that score somewhere before...

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