The Waltham Forest Guardian stretched its deadlines to literally “hold the front page” last night.

The paper wanted to cover a special town hall meeting where the Labour council leader was expected to be ousted by his own party.

The newspaper usually goes to press in the early afternoon on a Wednesday, for publication on Thursday morning.

But to get the very latest news on its pages this week a deal was been struck by Newsquest bosses with the printing press in Essex to hold back until around 9pm.

Labour council leader Coun Tony Buckley was suspended from his group by national party chiefs for bringing the party into disrepute.

He has been featured in the Evening Standard and the national Guardian newspaper this week, as well as in a Waltham Forest Guardian exclusive a week ago.

The local Labour group convened a one-off full-council meeting at Walthamstow town hall to kick him out of the position.

Reporter Tom Hutchinson went to the 7.30pm meeting to get quotes and see what happened.

As soon as the meeting finished he phoned the story into the office.

Chief reporter Lisa Bingham and editor Pat Stannard were on hand with a skeleton crew to write up the story from his call and sub it onto the page, ready for print.

During that time he drove back to the office – about a 15 minute drive – and checked over the finished story.

The paper has done something similar before when key events have happened outside its normal deadlines.

Tom said: “It’s quite an exciting thing for a journalist – you hear these stories about people calling to hold the front page at the last minute and that’s exactly what we are doing here.”

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