IF YOU’RE JUST waking up, this is the first day in more than 14 years that the Conservatives haven’t been in power in the UK.
This is not a spoiler: the result was seen as an inevitability for weeks, if not months or years, as the electorate’s desire for change coupled with the Tories’ messy internal battles made it clear that the Conservatives would not make it to another term in Government.
But although this was known, lots of things happened overnight that had more shades of grey than was perhaps expected.
So here’s everything you need to know about our nearest neighbour’s most game-changing election results for a long time.
Just after 5am, Labour officially reached the magic number of 326 seats, meaning that they had won a majority and therefore the election outright.
Moments before, outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak officially conceded, describing the result as a “sobering verdict”.
“There is much to learn and reflect on and I take responsibility for the loss,” he said.
Without getting into specifics about timing, he said he would “head down to London” to say more about the vote before leaving his job as Prime Minister.
Labour’s victory has been comprehensive: the party more than doubled its number of MPs, got a majority that is very similar to the Tony Blair landslide in 1997, and took back the Red Wall of constituencies in the north of England that swung to the Tories under Boris Johnson.
As of 7.30am, Labour have 410 seats, an increase of 210 on the last election.
The Conservatives have 117 seats, a drop of 247 seats, while the Liberal Democrats have 70 seats, which is up 62 on last time.
Here are the totals:
The exit poll for UK general elections is a huge endeavour and one that is usually reliable: for the past five general elections, it’s been accurate to within a range of 1.5 and 7.5 seats.
This time around, it was more a lot more wobbly.
Soon after the results landed at 10pm last night, commentators began raising questions about it. The Reform figure (13 seats) seemed high, for example, while the Labour figure (410) seemed slightly low.
Just before 4am, the BBC changed its projections from the exit poll.
Two of the most dramatic changes it suggested were that the Conservatives would actually win more than 150 seats, an increase of more than 20 seats on the exit poll projection, while Reform would win just four.
We won’t know until the full result comes out how accurate the exit poll was.
But right now, with some broadcasters tweaking their projections and with some of the predictions clearly wrong, it looks like it may have creaked when faced with the unpredictable impact of the Reform vote.
Rishi Sunak will resign as Prime Minister after the party lost over 200 seats – and is widely expected to resign as Conservative leader too.
The jostling to replace him as Tory leader began long before polling day: perennial thorn in the side of the party Suella Braverman penned a piece in the Telegraph earlier this week saying that the party was going to lose the election as she set out her stall for the leadership.
The party is at an existential fork in the road: does it tack to the right and focus on populist issues? Or does it take more of a centre-right path, reverting to a focus on growth, business and conservative values?
A lot is going to depend on who is left standing.
Penny Mordaunt, widely seen as a frontrunner for leader among the more moderate wing of the party, lost her seat in one of the shock results of the night.
Others are bruised by the party result but still standing: Kemi Badenoch and Braverman, both on the right of the party, kept their seats, while other leadership contenders, including James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat also retained their jobs.
Any leadership contender will need to rally support from the rump of MPs who remain in the House of Commons, and then decide on the best strategy for the future.
Key to answering that question is another one: how do they avoid getting squeezed by Labour in the centre and by Reform on the right?
As we saw with Mourdaunt, high-profile Tories have taken a hammering in the election.
Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Grant Shapps, Johnny Mercer, and Steve Baker all lost their seats.
The Conservatives were always going to suffer some high-profile losses given their vote share going into the election, but the level of casualties will come as a body blow to the party.
There were also some lesser-loved but still high-profile casualties, including former Deputy Prime Minister Thérese Coffey and Gillian Keegan, the Education Minister who was caught on camera complaining how she had done a “fucking good job’ in the face of a scandal over crumbling concrete in schools.
Others included Jonathan Gullis, and the owner of perhaps the most famous head of hair in the House of Commons, Michael Fabricant.
Shock results weren’t confined to the Tories.
The DUP’s Ian Paisley Jr lost his seat as MP for North Antrim in a surprise which means it is the first time since 1970 that a Paisley will not represent the constituency.
Paisley Jr lost to the TUV’s Jim Allister, a hardline unionist who set up the party in 2007 following his resignation from the DUP over its decision to enter into government with Sinn Féin.
You can read more about the results in Northern Ireland here.
After seven unsuccessful attempts to get to Westminster, Nigel Farage has finally won a seat at the eighth time of asking.
The Reform candidate was elected in Clacton-on-Sea, making him the fourth Reform candidate to get over the line.
Farage made no secret of his intentions in the run-up to the election, saying he wants to engineer a “reverse takeover” of the Conservative Party.
He said he is not interested in being the leader of “this Conservative Party”, which he said is controlled by “social democrats”.
“You can speculate as to what will happen in three or four years’ time. All I will tell you is if Reform succeed in a way that I think they can, then a chunk of the Conservative Party will join us.”
As readers are probably aware, the UK election results are based on a First Past the Post system, where voters opt for just one candidate and the person with the most votes in a constituency wins.
It’s different to Ireland’s system of PR-STV, and helps ensure that everything is done and dusted quite quickly (compared to days of counting on this side of the Irish Sea).
But not everyone in the UK is happy with their system given the way in which vote share translated into seats in the House of Commons.
Reform were forecast to get 15% of the vote in the election. If the British system was proportional, this would have worked out at them getting around 100 seats. Instead, they’ve ended up with somewhere between four and ten.
The other parties may be happy with that result but understandably, but Reform are not. Nigel Farage had pre-emptively called for a change in the voting system, calling it ”absolutely bankrupt” and criticising how it penalises smaller parties.
As a voting system, First Past the Post has electoral strengths: it’s easily understood by voters and it leads to strong governments, often with one party. But it also means parties do not always get fair representation, as has happened to Reform this time around.
Labour has absolutely no incentive to change the system, given that it saw them win a massive landslide.
But Farage has a point, particularly given Labour’s huge majority despite its very low vote share (around 34% at the time of writing. Is First Past the Post fit for purpose when it’s more than just a two-party system?
Compared with the technocratic campaigns of Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak, Liberal Democrats leader Ed Davey seemed to be taking part in a completely different election.
He surfed. He tried zumba dancing. He bungee jumped from a crane, shouting at people to vote Lib Dems as he did. If there was anything he could do to get in front of a camera, he did it.
It seems to have paid off: the Liberal Democrats went into the campaign with 11 MPs and will come out with more than 50.
There was substance behind Davey’s stunts – the party was fighting a ground war in the constituencies it had chosen to run in, aggressively targeting vulnerable Tory seats and making use of tactical voting.
And it ultimately paid off as the party more than quadrupled its number of MPs.
With reporting by Jane Matthews and Diarmuid Pepper
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