Labour won the UK’s general election with a landslide victory of 412 seats, delivering the party a 170-seat majority, with two seats left to declare.
Keir Starmer’s party reduced the Conservative Party to just 121 seats, in a contest that returned the Liberal Democrats to prominence with 71 seats.
Reform UK took home a substantial portion of the popular vote – 14.3% – however this only translated to four seats.
Labour landslide
Labour’s majority is the second-largest in the party’s history, after Tony Blair’s 1997 win. Starmer is only the fourth Labour leader to lead his party into government.
Starmer spoke from Downing Street for the first time today, with the new prime minister telling assembled press and the British public: "our country has voted decisively for change, for national renewal and a return of politics to national service".
The victory is all the more historic given the turnaround made in just one term, following the party’s 2019 defeat, in which the Conservatives secured 365 seats under former leader Boris Johnson.
The Tories had consistently trailed Labour by twenty points in polls ahead of the vote. The day before the election former work and pensions secretary Mel Stride said the result would be “the largest Labour landslide majority that this country has ever seen”.
Conservative woes
The Conservatives suffered a 250-seat loss with 11 cabinet ministers losing their seats, including defence secretary Grant Shapps and former leadership contender Penny Mordaunt.
Former PM Rishi Sunak also held onto his seat in Richmond and Northallerton. Conceding defeat from the steps of 10 Downing Street, he announced his plan to step down as Conservative leader “once formal arrangements are made” and apologised to the nation, saying that the result “sent a clear signal that the UK must change”.
A Conservative leadership contest will be held to determine his successor as leader of the party.
Liberal Dem revival
The Liberal Democrats came in from the cold, having left their 2010 coalition with the Conservatives with a meagre 8 seats in 2015, rising to only 11 in the last election.
Ed Davey’s action-packed campaign, the party’s aggressive canvassing in seats almost won from the Conservatives in 2019 and a strategic Labour retreat in those constituencies secured the Lib Dems a record-breaking 71 seats.
Davey said that after working so hard to get their voices heard, the Lib Dems are ready to “hold the new government to account”.
Reform in the house
The Lib Dem revival was initially eclipsed by predicted Reform wins. The new party was predicted to win 13 seats in the exit poll.
Having only gained traction with the surprise leadership announcement of Nigel Farage at the start of the campaign period, Reform emerged with just four seats.
Farage won his seat of Clacton and will enter Parliament for the first time, following seven failed attempts to become an MP.
Speaking during the BBC’s live election coverage, well-known pollster John Curtice, said that “a lot of the damage to the Conservatives has been done by Reform, even if Labour is the main beneficiary”.
Houghton and Sunderland South, famously the first constituency to declare on most election nights, delivered a surprise second place for Reform, which won over 11,668 seats – more than double the Conservative’s tally.
SNP collapse
Another party supplying Labour gains was the Scottish National Party (SNP), which lost over 30 seats and will now return to Parliament with only 9 MPs.
SNPs Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said that the party had been “swept aside by the Starmer tsunami” after retaining his Aberdeen South seat with a reduced majority.
SNP leader John Swinney said there will be a lot of “soul searching” after the poor results, which show the party is not “winning the argument on independence”.
Starmer’s stumble
A small blight on the victory was the erosion of Starmer’s majority by half, down from over 36,000 in 2019 to just 18,884.
Surrounded by the usual coterie of novelty candidates that run in a prospective leader’s seat, it was independent candidate and former anti-apartheid campaigner Andrew Feinstein who won over 7,000 votes, following a campaign that called for a ceasefire in Gaza and greater humanitarian support.
The issue has proved divisive for Labour, with former shadow cabinet member Jonathan Ashworth ousted by an independent candidate in Leicester South – the 35% of the vote Labour lost was mirrored exactly by Shockat Adam’s vote share.
