London - The hot ticket in London last night was the Election Night party at the American embassy, and there was plenty of competition elsewhere, with festivities at pubs, clubs and restaurants, especially ones with an American theme in a town with 250,000 expats.   Some 1,500 guests packed into the crowded chancery on Grosvenor Square.  The embassy staged a determinedly bipartisan affair, but efforts to divide the crowd into Republicans Abroad and Democrats Abroad—both groups are active in Britain—were swamped by a preponderance of Obama followers.

There was plenty of Americana on display, and no small amount of  kitsch.  Once past the concrete bomb barriers, guests were greeted with a group of cheerleaders doing acrobatics and assembling human pyramids; they were the called the Eagles, and actually hailed from East London.  Inside, wine was dispensed at half a dozen bars and by squads of waiters who oozed through the crowd.  Cartloads of Budweiser were rolled in and before long the well-lubricated crowd was making such a din that it was impossible to hear most of the many plasma TV monitors placed throughout three floors.  One lady worked the crowd dressed as the Statue of Liberty, and a young man with a carefully trimmed Mohawk had an American flag painted on the right side of his head.  A “barbershop choir” of a couple dozen ladies—traditionally embassy and American military wives, but nowadays mostly Brits—sang bravely but hardly a note could be heard.  In the basement, a folk rock band, also British, sang Bob Dylan numbers, and between songs made rude remarks about  George Bush and Dick Cheney.  At the opposite end of the room, Burger King was tossing Whoppers into the crowd faster than anyone could eat them, and Subway so many sandwiches ready there wasn't even a queue.

Even after nearly eight years of a Republican administration, the embassy crowd seemed overwhelmingly pro-Obama, and guests, even more so.  When very early returns from red states gave McCain a temporary lead in projected electoral votes, there was hardly any reaction, but when more substantial returns started trickling in after two in the morning Greenwich Mean Time—mostly discerned by reading the screens rather than listening to them—there were repeated bursts of loud cheering.  At the Republican party’s table, they couldn’t give away the pile of McCain Palin buttons; at the Democratic one, they hid Obama buttons out of sight and doled them out to bona fide Americans and Democrats.  “And don’t put it in your pocket, you have to wear it,” one of the ladies scolded a recipient.  Ambassador Robert Tuttle, a political appointee who previously was a Republican car dealer and major contributor to President Bush, made an early appearance.  "People have seen democracy at its most raw.  I always thought the most exciting election in my life would be Kennedy-Nixon, but this one has eclipsed it.”  He left early though, and when serious returns started pouring in by three in the morning, the crowd thinned out, McCain followers going home subdued, and Obama ones hanging in until well after four a.m., by which time the Starbucks barristas with backpack coffee dispensers had packed up and left.

The Tory shadow defense minister, Gerald Howarth, sported a McCain button and a disappointed demeanor, tired of hearing all this empty talk about change, as he put it. It was, clearly, a minority view.  A lot of people posed to have their pictures taken with the life-sized cutout of Sarah Palin, mostly mocking her or making rude gestures.  There was no such disrespect shown by those posing with Obama’s cutout, and no one paid much attention at all to John McCain.

See the full round-up of the world's reaction to the election of Barack Obama.