hung parliament. Mirroring Labour's poll results, several analysts and major participants in the campaign believe it actually had little effect. Jim Parish, senior campaigns officer for the Labour Party from 1985 to 1993 and an organiser of the rally, wrote: "The catastrophic 6–7 per cent drop in Labour support occurred before the rally and was – I am reliably informed – known in Sheffield that night." Polls conducted in the final week of the campaign continued to show either the two main parties neck-and-neck or Labour slightly ahead, as they had done prior to the rally. Some accounts suggest the event only received widespread attention after the election, an opinion Kinnock shared in an April 2010 New Statesman interview: "It wasn't until about ten days after the election that people started writing about the 'hubristic Sheffield rally' and all the rest of it." In fact, the rally was discussed several times during the BBC's election-night coverage; David Dimbleby questioned Labour's then Shadow Chancellor, John Smith, about the hubristic nature of the rally; BBC commentator David Davies suggested it may have hurt Labour in the Midlands, being seen as “too self-congratulatory, too soon”; and both Conservative David Mellor and Shirley Williams of the SDP discussed it in a roundtable conversation. In a 1995 interview for the BBC Two documentary series The Wilderness Years, Kinnock said: "...all of the years in which I'd attempted to build a fairly reserved, starchy persona – in a few seconds, they slipped away." In the 2010 New Statesman interview, Kinnock expressed a different opinion on the effect of his performance at the rally. He said: "Given my time again, I wouldn't repeat it – but the great legend is complete, bloody rubbish." In 2021, writing on Kinnock's failure to become Prime Minister, Steve Richards argued that the rally had "acquired a mythological status as fatal event", but noted that prior to Labour's defeat "there was no suggestion that Kinnock had made a terrible blunder". He noted that the BBC's political editor John Cole had indicated he had been impressed in his live reporting of the rally and it was only retrospectively that it started to be portrayed as showing Kinnock as "overconfident and cocky". Richards concluded that blaming the event for Labour's defeat was "a red herring" and the party would have lost the election even if there had been no Sheffield Rally. The event is