It's the Nadine Dorries show! Former Culture Secretary upstages Emily Maitlis with secret Boris message and even accuses Alastair Campbell of sexism in box office appearance on Channel Four

Former Conservative minister Nadine Dorries stole the show on election night by accusing Alastair Campbell of sexism and revealing that former prime minister Boris Johnson had sent her text messages.

Appearing on Channel 4 as part of the broadcaster's election programme, hosted by Emily Maitlis and Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Ms Dorries faced off against the former Labour Party spokesperson just minutes after polls closed at 10pm.

She also caused laughter from viewers after Ms Maitlis appeared to struggle not to roll her eyes at one of her answers.

The former culture secretary and staunch Boris Johnson supporter said the predicted results are a “disaster” for the party, after an exit poll predicted the party would win just 131 seats.

Asked about the meteoric rise of the Reform Party, which is expected to win 13 seats, Ms Dorriess pointed out that the far-right party was polling in single digits when Mr Johnson was prime minister.

Mr. Campbell then interrupted him and said: “You really must forget Boris.”

Ms Dorries replied: “I think that's quite a sexist comment.”

Mr Campbell retorted: “That's really not the case.”

The pair continued to trade blows throughout the show, with the presenters occasionally having to intervene.

Minutes later, another clash took place, this time between Labour's Harriet Harman and the Conservatives' Kwasi Kwarteng.

Ms Harman accused Mr Kwarteng of being “patronising” in his response.

Mrs Dorries steps in and says: “It seems it's up to me and Harriet to hold the men on this stage to account.”

Later in the show, she was asked if her former boss Boris Johnson had stayed in touch with her since the exit poll.

Looking at her phone, she confirmed he had done so, but when asked to share what he had told her, Ms Dorries replied: “No.”

Asked whether Mr Johnson had suggested he might make a return to frontline politics, Ms Dorries stammered, before saying the country needed a strong leader to counter the “rise of the far right” – but stopped short of naming him.

The announcement comes after exit polls predicted Labour would have a total of 410 seats after the election, giving it a majority of 170.

The Conservatives are expected to have 131, the Liberal Democrats 61, the Reformists 13 and the SNP 10.

The SNP's vote would be decimated, having won 48 seats in the 2019 election, while Plaid Cymru in Wales is expected to gain four seats.

The Greens are also expected to win a second seat in Bristol after a close campaign.

The Conservatives, in power since 2010, are set to be relegated to the opposition benches in the House of Commons, with exit polls suggesting their numbers will be reduced to 131 seats, a loss of some 241 MPs.

This would be the lowest number of MPs ever recorded.

In 2019, under Boris Johnson, the party won 365 seats, with a majority of 80.

That total is now set to be eclipsed by the result expected by the end of the night for Sir Keir Starmer's Labour party, which is expected to win power with a total of 410 seats according to the poll.

Rishi Sunak has sought to outwardly portray himself as optimistic, only saying on Wednesday – the final day of the campaign – that he was an “underdog” fighting until “the final whistle”.

But the exit poll, the final test of public opinion on the night of the vote count, has now highlighted the scale of the devastation facing the Conservatives.

Several senior Cabinet ministers are at risk of losing their seats tonight, including Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Commons Leader Penny Mordaunt, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, Justice Secretary Alex Chalk and Education Secretary Gillian Keegan.

Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said the forecast was “encouraging” but a number of seats were “on a knife edge”.

“If you look at where we were in 2019, just to get a majority we would have had to have had a bigger swing than Tony Blair in 1997,” she told the BBC.

“So we know that a number of seats were on the edge, based on our own data, but I also know that all of our campaigners and our candidates went out into the field and took nothing for granted and spoke to the electorate about what matters to them.”

A Conservative source said: “It is clear from these results that we will have lost some very good, hard-working candidates.”

Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said his party was “on track to deliver our best results in a century, thanks to our positive campaign focused on health and care”.

Elsewhere, the race to be the first seat of the night to be declared was won by Houghton and Sunderland South, which was won again by Labour's shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson.

Ms Phillipson won 18,847 votes, or 47 per cent, ahead of the British Reform Party with 11,668 votes, more than double the Conservatives with 5,514 votes, the Liberal Democrats with 2,290 votes and the Green Party with 1,723 votes. Turnout was 51.2 per cent.