Keir Starmer will become Prime Minister in the coming hours after sweeping away a 14-year era of Conservative rule and leading the Labour Party to a massive landslide victory in Britain’s general election.
British rejected the Conservatives by a historic margin, and Starmer will be a very powerful prime minister.
But there are urgent issues needing his attention. And as the final results of the election are counted, a number of eye-opening trends are becoming clear.
Here’s what you need to know.
Labour’s huge, but fragile, landslide
Labour’s victory was seismic. It was very nearly unprecedented; only Tony Blair’s Labour Party has ever won more seats in an election
As the sun rose over London, Keir Starmer told a buoyant victory rally that a burden has been “finally removed form the shoulders of this great nation.”
“Change begins now,” he said.
But Labour’s win was also fragile. The vote breakdown made clear that the election was as much, if not more, about the public’s anger towards the Conservatives as it was about excitement for Labour’s offer.
Keir Starmer’s party only increased its vote share by a few percentage points from its dismal 2019 showing, even though it may end up with almost twice as many seats. Starmer won a smaller vote share than his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn did in 2017, an election that Labour also lost. It was helped in seat after seat by a strong showing from populists Reform UK, who tore votes away from the Conservatives.
Those stats highlight the oddities of Britain’s first-past-the-post voting system, but also the dangers facing Starmer. He will govern with a powerful majority in parliament, but the public coalition he has built will not afford him a long honeymoon period.
He will be opposed by the Conservatives, but also by Reform, which challenged Labour candidates in several seats around the country. And a throng of left-wing support will also attempt to detract attention from Starmer; his predecessor Corbyn, who had been expelled by the party, won as an independent in Islington North and will become the face of that opposition.
Starmer was far more popular than Sunak, opinion polls showed, but he has never enjoyed the healthy approval ratings that Blair and Boris Johnson once did, lacking the natural charisma or campaigning prowess of those leaders.
“Election victories don’t fall from the sky. They’re hard won, and hard fought for,” he acknowledged in his victory speech. Starmer has promised “a decade of national renewal,” a pledge that nods to the deep-seated problems in Britain’s public services but also the lengthy stint he intends to spend in government. Whether or not he completes that goal could depend heavily on the early impression he leaves on the public as Prime Minister.
A devastating Conservative defeat
Unlike Labour’s victory, there are no two sides to the Conservatives’ performance. This was a woeful showing, after a dreadful campaign, and it has consigned the Tories not just to opposition but on the cusp on irrelevance.
Senior Conservatives fell like dominoes in seat after seat; the party was decimated by Labour and Reform in the so-called Red Wall swathe of battleground seats across North England and the Midlands, and by the Liberal Democrats in affluent areas in southern England that it had previously controlled for decades.
And a line of high-profile figures – the faces of a 14-year era of power – stunningly lost their seats. Penny Mourdant, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Robert Buckland, Alex Chalk and others were dumped from power. The outgoing chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, narrowly clung on.
And the most sensational defeat was saved until last: shortly after 6 a.m., in one of the final seats to declare, former Prime Minister Liz Truss lost her previously ultra-safe seat.
She refused to speak after her defeat, leaving the stage with her fellow candidates instead, attempting to retain a steely look on her face.
“I’m sorry,” Sunak told activists and voters after winning his count. There was not much more he could say.
Before this election, only three Cabinet ministers had lost their seat this century, and all were Lib Dems serving in coalition with the Conservatives.
It opened up a furious and bitter backlash within the party about what went wrong. “Our renewal as a party and a country will not be achieved by us talking to an ever-smaller slice of ourselves, but by being guided by the people of this country,” Mordaunt said after losing her seat, implicitly taking aim at the populist wing of the party, which has recently sought to pull it towards the right on issues such as migration.
Buckland was blunter. “I’m fed up with performance art politics,” Buckland told the BBC. “I’ve watched colleagues in the Conservative Party strike poses, write inflammatory op-eds and say stupid things they have no evidence for instead of concentrating on doing the job that they were elected to do.
“I think we’ve seen in this election astonishing ill-discipline within the party,” he added.
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