A new political dawn beckoned for Britain as the Labour Party was bearing down on a return to power on Thursday night in a landslide election victory, ending 14 years of sometimes chaotic rule by a divided, exhausted, and ultimately defeated Conservative Party.
Keir Starmer was poised to become only the seventh Labour prime minister in Britain’s history, replacing the embattled Tory incumbent Rishi Sunak in Downing Street, according to a comprehensive exit poll from UK broadcasters released once voting ended at 10pm on Thursday.
The exit poll predicted Labour would win 410 seats while the Conservatives would win just 131, a cataclysmic projected defeat for the governing party.
Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party was projected to win up to 13 seats, while the Liberal Democrats were on course for 61 seats, a strong showing. It was predicted that the Scottish National Party (SNP) would also face a disastrous result, with just 10 seats, down from the 48 it won in 2019. The final details were not expected to be confirmed until Friday morning as official results rolled in overnight.
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Labour was overjoyed with the predicted result, as the exit poll confirmed weeks of predictions by pollsters of disaster for the Conservatives. Senior Tory politicians had spent the final weeks of the campaign warning Britain’s voters against the dangers of returning Labour to government with a “supermajority”. It seemed the voters did not listen.
Mr Starmer thanked voters after the exit poll result was released. “I have changed the Labour Party. I will change Britain,” he said. Mr Sunak had said earlier he would take responsibility for the Tory result.
Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner said she thinks voters are punishing the Conservatives for the last 14 years. Ms Rayner said the exit poll, which projects a Labour landslide, was encouraging but stressed that the results were not yet in.
“Keir has done a tremendous job in transforming the Labour Party and putting forward a programme for government that the country can get behind and after 14 years of the chaos and the scandals and the decline we have seen under Tories I think they are getting punished for that – that’s pretty clear in the polls as well,” she told Sky News.
The Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said he was “humbled” by the support shown for the Liberal Democrats after the exit poll showed them on course to win 61 seats, close to their best results in modern political history and a near tenfold increase on their 2019 total. A tally of 61, if confirmed, would be one short of the 62 secured under Charles Kennedy in 2005.
Former Tory minister Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has said it is “clearly a terrible night”, adding that the party has taken votes for granted.
Sir Jacob told the BBC: “There’s no way of describing this as anything other than a bad night for the Conservative party.”
Asked where it went wrong for the Tories, Sir Jacob said there were “issues with changing the leader”, adding: “Voters expect the prime minister they have chosen to remain the prime minister and for it to be the voters who decide when that person is changed.”
He continued: “I’m afraid I think the Conservative Party took it’s core vote for granted, which is why you see so many people who may have voted Conservative previously, going off to Reform.”
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg said it would be “interesting” to see whether Nigel Farage can achieve “a realignment of the right in British politics”.
Asked whether he thought the Tories should have sought to join forces with Mr Farage, the former Conservative minister said: “We are where we are and the disaster doesn’t seem to have been averted.
“You’ll have to ask Nigel what his plans are. I think he looks for and seeks a realignment of the right in British politics, and it will be interesting to see whether he can achieve that.”
On a video posted to X, formerly Twitter, Mr Farage said: “It’s midnight, there are two results in from the north-east of England that put Reform on 30% of the vote, that is way more than any possible prediction or projection. It is almost unbelievable.
“And what does it mean? It means we’re going to win seats, many many seats I think right now across the country.
“But to watch the TV coverage it’s almost comical. There’s not a single representative on there from Reform UK, mainstream media are in denial just as much as our political parties.
“This is going to be six million votes-plus. This, folks, is huge.”
The vote on Thursday came after a gruelling six-week campaign that started disastrously for the Tory party, when Mr Sunak called the snap election while getting drenched in the rain outside Downing Street, spawning a cottage industry of mocking internet memes.
The re-election campaign run by Mr Sunak was beset by a series of major gaffes, most notably his widely-panned decision last month to return to Britain early from a D-Day landings commemoration in France that was attended by other world leaders. The Tory leader later asked for forgiveness from angry voters who felt he had disrespected the nation’s war dead.
The election campaign was also overshadowed by a gambling scandal after it emerged that several senior Tory candidates and party staffers had placed bets at bookmakers predicting a July election in the days preceding Mr Sunak’s surprise decision to call the snap poll.
The Labour leader ran a cautious election campaign that was seen as relatively light on policy detail but heavy on foreboding rhetoric, as he reminded voters of the post-Brexit “chaos” wrought on Britain under Tory rule.
Mr Starmer and Labour’s Rachel Reeves, who appears set to become the first woman appointed as chancellor of the exchequer, also tried to fend off Tory warnings that Labour would hike taxes.
Mr Starmer repeatedly told voters in the latter stages of the campaign not to wake up on Friday “to five more years of the Tories”. Ultimately, it appeared voters heeded the Labour message.
With most results in the North due to be declared in the early hours of Friday morning, Sinn Féin was hoping to hold its existing tally of seven seats, which could allow it to overtake the DUP – currently on eight seats but under pressure in several constituencies – to become the largest of the Northern parties at Westminster.
The night’s key battle was expected to be in east Belfast, where the DUP leader Gavin Robinson is bidding to hold on to his seat against a strong challenge from the Alliance leader, Naomi Long. Additional reporting: PA
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