Keir Starmer will be Britain's next prime minister and his Labour Party is on track to win a large majority in parliamentary elections, an exit poll showed on Thursday, while Rishi Sunak's Conservatives are forecast to suffer historic losses.
The poll showed Labour would win 410 seats in the 650-seat parliament, ending 14 years of Conservative-led rule.
Sunak's party is forecast to win just 131 seats, down from 346 when parliament was dissolved, as voters punish the Conservatives for a cost-of-living crisis and years of instability and infighting that have seen five different prime ministers since 2016.
The centrist Liberal Democrats are forecast to win 61 seats, while Brexiteer Nigel Farage's right-wing populist Reform UK party is expected to win 13.
In the last six national elections, only one exit poll has given an incorrect result: in 2015, when the poll predicted a hung parliament, when in fact the Conservatives won the majority. The official results will be announced in the next few hours.
Sunak surprised Westminster and many in his own party by calling an election earlier than necessary in May, when the Conservatives were about 20 points behind Labour in opinion polls.
I had hoped the gap would narrow as has traditionally happened in British elections, but the deficit has not narrowed in a fairly disastrous campaign.
It all started badly when he was left soaked by rain outside Downing Street while announcing the vote, before his Conservative advisers and candidates became embroiled in a gambling scandal involving suspicious bets placed on the day of the election.
Sunak's early departure from D-Day commemorations in France to give a television interview angered veterans, and even within his own party said it raised questions about his political acumen.
If the exit poll is correct, it will represent an incredible turnaround for Starmer and the Labour Party, which critics and supporters say was facing an existential crisis just three years ago when it lost a parliamentary seat by a 16% swing to the Conservatives — a near-unique victory for a governing party.
But a series of scandals – most notably the revelation of parties in Downing Street during the COVID lockdowns – undermined then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and by November 2021 the Conservatives’ lead in the polls, which had been larger than at any time during Margaret Thatcher’s 11-year rule, had disappeared.
Liz Truss's disastrous six-week tenure, which followed Johnson's forced exit at the end of 2022, cemented the decline, with Sunak unable to dent Labour's now commanding lead in the polls.
Although polls have suggested there is no huge enthusiasm for Labour leader Starmer, his simple message that it was time for a change appears to have resonated with voters.
Unlike in France, where Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally party made historic gains in Sunday's election, the disillusioned British public appears to have shifted to the centre-left.
