UK general election: Labour obliterate Tories with historic election win — exit poll

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 Labour would win the largest majority in the House of Commons since Tony Blair’s famous win in 1997.

The scale of the predicted victory means Labour Leader Keir Starmer looks certain to be appointed Britain’s 58th prime minister early Friday morning — ending 14 years in the political wilderness for his party.

“People wanted change and people have voted for that in large numbers,” said Rachel Reeves, who is expected to be named the U.K.’s first female chancellor in Starmer’s cabinet, in a BBC interview.

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 predicted 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.

“It’s going to be an incredibly difficult night,” Tory minister — and staunch Brexit campaigner — Steve Baker told the BBC.

By contrast the poll forecasts Labour to finish with 410 MPs — almost two-thirds of the 650 seats in the House of Commons — and a thumping majority of 170.

Such numbers would make Starmer the U.K.’s most powerful leader since Blair, with complete command of parliament and a second term beckoning in five years’ time.

Over the course of the six-week campaign, Starmer urged voters to give him their backing and “turn the page” on years of scandal, division and economic turmoil under former PMs Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

Starmer was criticised for his pedestrian debating style and for giving few details of his plans for power. But none of those things seemed to matter: Just not being a Tory seemed to be enough for many voters, with pollsters identifying a widespread public mood for change.

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. | Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

A Labour victory in the U.K. would buck the trend of center-left decline in many prosperous Western economies. Growing numbers of voters in countries including France, Italy and Germany have been embracing the far-right at recent elections.

In France, the party of Marine Le Pen is one step away from taking power in parliamentary elections for the first time in the republic’s modern history in a vote this Sunday.

That trend was on show in the U.K. exit poll findings, too, though not to the same extent as elsewhere in Europe.

The exit poll forecast Nigel Farage’s insurgent Reform UK party to finish with 13 MPs in the Commons — far more than expected. That would mark a breakthrough moment for Britain’s populist right, and personally for Farage, who will be confident of winning his own seat in Clacton, Essex, finally becoming an MP at the eighth attempt.

Elsewhere, the poll forecast a dramatic revival for the centrist Liberal Democrats, who would be restored as Britain’s third-largest party with 61 seats after almost a decade of obscurity following their stint in a power-sharing coalition with David Cameron’s Conservatives.

But there was bleak news for the once-mighty Scottish National Party. In 2019, the pro-Scottish independence SNP won 48 of Scotland’s 57 Westminster seats.

But the exit poll saw the SNP slumping to just 10 MPs, a disaster for a party which has dominated Scottish politics since 2015 — but has faced a series of scandals and declining popularity in recent years.

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.

Delight and relief for Labour

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.”

Labour leader Keir Starmer. | Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

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, Emilio Casalicchio and Tim Ross provided additional reporting.