UK general election: Labour obliterate Tories with historic election win — exit poll
Keir Starmer on course to be most powerful British prime minister since Tony Blair.
BY JACK BLANCHARD AND ANDREW MCDONALD
LONDON — The Labour Party is heading for a landslide victory in Britain’s general election, consigning the ruling Conservatives to their worst result in history, according to the official exit poll.
As voting ended across Britain at 10 p.m. local time, the poll projected a stunning Labour majority in the House of Commons of 170 seats, the largest held since Tony Blair’s famous win in 1997.
The scale of the predicted win means Labour Leader Keir Starmer looks certain to be anointed Britain’s 58th prime minister early Friday morning — ending 14 years in the political wilderness for his party.
“After 14 years the British people have voted change,” said Starmer’s Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, the first Labour MP to be elected on the night.
For the Tories, the result — though widely predicted — is crushing, a disastrous end to PM Rishi Sunak’s audacious snap election gambit. He is widely expected to resign in the coming hours.
The exit poll predicts the Tories will collapse to just 131 seats — the lowest total in the party’s illustrious history, comfortably beating its previous nadir of 156 back in 1906.
UK election estimated results based on exit poll
20192024
410 seats
LAB
131 seats
CON
61 seats
LD
19 seats
OTHER
RE
SNP
PC
GREEN
Labour Party
Conservative Party
Liberal Democrats
Other parties
Reform UK
Scottish National Party
Plaid Cymru
Green Party
650 / 650 seats assigned
“It’s going to be an incredibly difficult night,” Tory Minister — and arch Brexiteer — Steve Baker told the BBC.
By contrast the poll puts Labour on an enormous 410 seats — almost two-thirds of the House of Commons’ 650 total.
Such numbers would make Starmer the U.K.’s most powerful leader since Blair, with complete command of parliament and confident of winning a second term in five years’ time. He has vowed to end years of political turbulence, revive Britain’s crumbling public services and kick-start the stuttering economy.
Starmer’s stunning win bucks the trend of center-left decline around the world, making Britain an unlikely bastion of social democracy just as Western allies edge toward the hard right.
Nevertheless, Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK is forecast to win 13 seats in the House of Commons — far higher than expected, and a breakthrough moment for Britain’s populist right. On such a result Farage will be confident of winning his own seat in Clacton, Essex — so finally becoming an MP at the eighth attempt.
The poll also forecast a dramatic revival for the centrist Lib Dems, who would be restored as Britain’s third-largest party with 61 seats after almost a decade of obscurity.
But there was bleak news for the once-mighty Scottish National Party, which won 48 of Scotland’s 57 seats in 2019. The exit poll has the SNP slumping to just 10, a disaster for a party which has dominated Scottish politics since 2015 — but has faced a series of scandals and declining popularity of late.
Speaking on ITV, the former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she feared a poor night for her party. “There will be a lot of questions that need to be asked,” she said.
In private Labour Party officials struggled to contain their glee, having witnessed their party suffer four miserable election defeats at the hands of the Tories since 2010.
“We are looking slightly incredulously at the SNP and Reform numbers,” said one. “But [we are] delighted and relieved. You don’t know paranoia like Labour members.”
Within Tory circles the blame game was already underway, with key figures blaming global crises like Covid-19 as well as Sunak and his ill-fated campaign.
“We’ve not really given enough thought to what the electorate wants,” one minister said. “Some of it is our own mismanagement.”
Others were far less charitable, pointing the finger squarely at key Sunak aides like Party Chair Richard Holden and Deputy PM Oliver Dowden.
“No two ways about it, it’s a catastrophic comedown even from the turn of the year,” a second Tory minister said. “Holden, Dowden and other over-promoted ex-[advisers] who steered us at full tilt into this iceberg should be exiled to Ascension … or somewhere a little more remote.”
Asked about his party’s future, Baker — also expected to lose his seat — said there will “undoubtedly be recriminations, there will be shock, there will be anger, there will be denial.
“We will go through a grieving process, then we will have to at some point earn the right to be heard again,” he added.
But some Tories were simply relieved the result was not even worse. Some pre-election polls suggested the party could effectively be wiped from the electoral map. “I had feared worse,” a third Tory minister admitted.
“It’s a disaster for the Tories — but it’s not the complete catastrophe that some were predicting,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, and author of “The Conservative Party after Brexit.”
“They will be spooked, though, by what looks like a strong showing from Reform. The question is: Will that see them swing even further to the populist right than they have already?”
This developing story is being updated. Dan Bloom, Sam Blewett, Stefan Boscia and Emilio Casalicchio provided additional reporting.
POLITICO