Last night saw a landslide defeat of the Conservatives in the U.K's general election, and this morning the victorious Labour Party's Keir Starmer visited King Charles and was offered the job of Prime Minister. Outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak signaled his resignation not long into the late-night vote count; though turnout was low and Labour failed to meet the promise of outlier polls suggesting total obliteration for the Tories, it was nonetheless one of their best results in British electoral history.
After 14 years of Conservative government marked by austerity, Brexit and five prime ministers (six including the lettuce), the result represents an overwhelming desire among Britons and other U.K. voters to be rid of them.
If anything, the tally (with Labour nabbing 412 seats and the Conservatives only 121) was rather closer to that putative wipeout than early results suggested—at one point the BBC calculated that the Tories might keep more than 160 seats. Labour's majority will be as high as 178 depending on what the last straggling constituencies report, one short of that commanded by Tony Blair in 1997. Some expect the party to reabsorb some of the left-wing independents in the coming days and weeks, though it has surely burned its bridges with the most prominent among them: former leader Jeremy Corbyn held his Islington North seat without much effort on the night.
Labour has much to be anxious about despite its majority. The party's vote share, 33.7%, fell far short of what opinion polls expected—not only was it less than Corbyn's 40% in 2017, but is only 1% more than what Corbyn won in the otherwise disastrous 2019 election. As the BBC's election expert John Curtice put it, Labour didn't win so much as the Tories lost. Starmer's unappetizing centrism (he was described as "ferociously boring" by one commentator and a "political robot" by one voter at a townhall meeting) seems to have put off as many voters as it gained—though it put them off and gained them in mostly the right places.
Lefties drifted to the Liberal Democrats, who won a record 71 seats in Parliament on 13% of the vote, and to the Greens, whose 4 seats represents 7% of the vote—an unexpectedly strong performance for a party that barely figured in the last election.
On the far right, Reform UK took 14% of the vote—more than enough to collapse the Tories' base—while taking 4 seats. Reform's widely-dispersed support makes it hard to win seats in parliament given the UK's first-past-the-post system, though leader Nigel Farage took Clacton, becoming an M.P. on his eighth attempt. And he'll be delighted that his party came second in nearly 100 constituencies.
Welsh nationalists had an excellent night, nabbing 4 seats as Wales became completely Tory-free, but the Scottish National Party, badly hurt by a year of scandal and political missteps, lost most of theirs.
Previously: Exit poll suggests Labour landslide in UK election