Andrew MacAskill, Elizabeth Piper, Alistair Smote
LONDON (Reuters) – Keir Starmer is set to become Britain’s next prime minister and his Labour party is set to win a landslide majority in parliamentary elections, while Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are expected to suffer a historic defeat, exit polls showed on Thursday.
The centre-left Labour Party is set to win 410 of the 650 seats in Parliament, a stunning reversal from five years ago when it suffered its worst performance since 1935.
The result will give Labour a majority of 170 seats, bringing to an end 14 years of increasingly chaotic Conservative-led government.
“I want to thank everyone who supported Labour in this election, everyone who voted for us and put their faith in a changed Labour party,” Starmer said on X.
Sunak’s party was expected to win just 131 seats – its worst election result in its history – after voters criticised the rising cost of living and years of instability and internal infighting that have seen five prime ministers since the 2016 Brexit vote.
The centrist Liberal Democrats were expected to win 61 seats, while the right-wing populist Reform UK Party, led by Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, who has pledged to defeat the Conservatives, was expected to win 13 seats.
While the Reform Party’s projections were much better than expected, the overall results suggest that, unlike in France, where Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rally National party made historic gains in last Sunday’s general election, disillusioned Britons are shifting their support to the centre-left.
The Conservatives were not the only ones expected to suffer a steep drop in the vote: the pro-independence Scottish National Party was forecast to win just 10 seats, its worst showing since 2010 and after a period of turmoil that saw two leaders resign in just over a year.
In the last six UK elections, exit polls have only been wrong once. The official results are due to be announced in the next few hours.
“If the exit poll is correct, this is a historic defeat for the Conservative Party, one of the most tenacious forces in the history of British politics,” Kieran Pedley, research director at Ipsos, which conducted the exit poll, told Reuters.
“It looked like the Conservatives were going to be in power for 10 years, and then it all came crashing down.”
Labor market transformation
Mr Sunak surprised many in Westminster and his party by calling a general election sooner than necessary in May, despite the Conservatives trailing Labour by around 20 points in the opinion polls.
There was hope that the margin of votes would narrow, as is traditionally the case in UK elections, but in a fairly disastrous campaign the margin of votes did not narrow.
The Prime Minister got off to a terrible start, getting soaked in the rain outside Downing Street as he announced the result, and then his aides and Conservative candidates were embroiled in a gambling scandal over questionable bets made on election day.
Sunak’s decision to leave an event marking the Normandy landings in France early to give a television interview angered veterans and raised questions about his political skills, even within his own party.
If the exit polls are correct, it would mark a stunning turnaround for Mr Starmer and the Labour Party, which critics and supporters alike said was facing an existential threat just three years ago after its heavy defeat in the 2019 election.
But a series of scandals, notably the revelation about parties held in Downing Street during the coronavirus lockdown, weakened then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s position and his overwhelming poll lead evaporated.
After Johnson was forced to step down at the end of 2022, Chancellor Liz Truss’ disastrous six weeks in power sealed the decline in popularity, and Sunak was unable to make any dent in Labour’s current commanding poll lead.
“This reversal is unprecedented in British history and shows the magnitude of the upheaval that can occur when voters believe promises have been broken,” Pedley said.
Opinion polls show Labour leader Starmer does not enjoy high support, but his simple message that it’s time for change appears to have resonated with voters.
However, Labour’s expected results are unlikely to match the record numbers it won in 1997 and 2001, when it won 418 and 412 seats respectively under Tony Blair’s government.
