In the event, their presence at the entrance to ward off gate-crashers was entirely unnecessary and it was the frustrated and bored audience inside the building who wished to escape the painfully slow scenes of counting the votes. The new, hi-tech, electronic, counting machines responsible for analysing the 280,000 ballot papers from Kingston, Richmond and Hounslow bleeped like supermarket scanners.

But the similarity ends there, because the scanners at Tesco do not break down every few minutes.

In Hounslow, only 10 or 11 machines of the total 13 were working at any one time, which added to the frustrations shared by the bleary-eyed politicians present.

These delays were even more infuriating for Comet staff, who watched their 6am deadline for the planned Election Special pass, with a mayoral result still hours away.

Returning officer Mike Smith ruled out the possibility suggested elsewhere in London that dust was the cause of the mechanical breakdown, because of the Civic Centre's air-conditioning.

But there was a certain irony in the technical hitches - these machines were introduced to speed up the counting process.

Some of the more organised spectators, sporting their political rosettes, climbed into their sleeping bags in anticipation of a long night ahead.

One tired counting agent told the Comet: "The procedure is all wrong. They should have started the voting in the morning, to get a result later in the day."

Kingston Council chief executive, Bruce McDonald, said that his tour of the polling booths around the Royal Borough had shown that most people seemed to adapt well to the new voting system.

But many voters still made a mess of their ballot papers and countless slips were rejected by the adjudicators.

Some had obscenities scrawled across them or were signed by the voter.