A long night – and a new prime minister

Good morning. Liz Truss lost. A new dawn has broken, has it not?

At 4.58am, a moment before Jacob Rees-Mogg was defeated in Somerset, Labour won their 326th seat and officially won the election. As of a few minutes ago, they had reached 408 seats. In front of a jubilant crowd at 5am, the new prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, said: “We did it … now we can look forward again, walk into the morning – the sunlight of hope, pale at first, but getting stronger through the day.”

The result for the Conservatives – 112 seats so far and not many left to add – is a cataclysm, and even that was treated by some as a let-off. The Lib Dems had a brilliant night, the SNP a disastrous one, and the Greens have a foothold. And Reform UK have four seats – less than the exit poll predicted, but still unimaginable not very long ago.

There are a million stories to come out of the night, and still coming – you can follow the live blog here, and we’ll explain as many of them as we can below. But among all of it we shouldn’t miss the most important one: Labour have inflicted an historic defeat on the Conservatives. Keir Starmer is prime minister. And 14 years of Tory-led rule is over. Sunak could end the campaign as he began: a speech outside No 10 in the pouring rain.

Here are the election night headlines.

Five big stories

In depth: Starmer’s historic win – and annihilation for Sunak

As the MRP polls have piled up in recent weeks, there has been a sense of disbelief at the scale of the Conservative defeat they suggested. In the end, with many seats very close calls, the number of wins for Labour came in at the lower end of the range they suggested. The total apocalypse feared by some Tories – even the idea of them wrestling with the Lib Dems for second place – did not materialise. But don’t let the weird psychology of expectation management distract from the fact that this is still an astonishing result.

Here’s how that played out over the last few hectic hours.

Labour | Stunning vindication or a “loveless landslide”?

Labour piled up gains well beyond what the swing towards them might have suggested thanks to the remarkable efficiency of their vote – and the way Reform devoured votes that might once have belonged to the Tories. The BBC estimated that the swing away from the Conservatives in the seats they lost to Labour was 26% – with far more of it towards Reform than towards Labour. Early in the night, Channel 4’s political editor, Gary Gibbon, described it as a “loveless landslide”. Starmer’s vast majority is built on what may end up as a smaller vote share than Jeremy Corbyn achieved in 2017, and less than 2% higher than it was in 2019.

But it is also true that Labour fought the election in front of it, after a gruelling defeat in 2019 that many doubted the party could come back from – and their success on a relatively small vote share is arguably vindication of that strategy, and of Starmer and his team’s recognition of the political landscape they faced. Labour is now the largest party in England, Scotland and Wales – the first party to achieve that in nearly a quarter of a century. It twice broke the record for swing towards it from the Tories, in Swindon North and Telford. And Starmer is only the fourth Labour leader to win an election in the last 80 years.

Alongside many Tory scalps – more on those below – the party did suffer some notable losses that went against the grain, mostly in areas with large Muslim populations – suggesting that anger at the party’s position on the war in Gaza had played a part. Jonathan Ashworth, shadow paymaster general, suffered a stunning defeat to independent candidate Shockat Adam. Meanwhile, shadow culture secretary Thangam Debbonaire was defeated by Green co-leader Carla Denyer in Bristol Central.

Conservatives | Portillo moments become Truss moments, collapsing vote share, and a fight for the party’s future

How did Labour win so big with such a small increase in their vote share? Here’s your answer: the Tories got their smallest vote share ever, currently about 23%. It is a measure of the party’s truly catastrophic recent history that many will be breathing a sigh of relief.

But many will not – the eight cabinet ministers dumped so far, one more than 1997, among them. A debate is already under way about where the party went wrong, and whether it must now tack to the centre or chase the voters who abandoned it for Reform: when Robert Buckland, the former cabinet minister, became the first to lose his seat in Swindon South, he said he had had enough of “performance art politics”, by “ill-disciplined” and “spectacularly unprofessional” Tories. He added that if they are not careful the Tories will become like “a group of bald men fighting over a comb”.

More of those candidates to be Portillo moments: Grant Shapps, Penny Mordaunt, Gillian Keegan – who the public appears not to have agreed did a “fucking good job” – Alex Chalk, and Simon Hart. Then there were the defeats handed to well-known figures like Jonathan Gullis, Johnny Mercer, Thérèse Coffey, Michael Fabricant and Jacob Rees-Mogg. Jeremy Hunt only just held on to his seat. And the defeat of Liz Truss by 600 votes in South West Norfolk, the first former prime minister to lose their seat in a century, is surely the ultimate symbol of the Tory disaster. Portillo moments may have a new name.

Lib Dems | An election where nothing went wrong

With only a tiny increase on their vote share last time of 0.2%, the Liberal Democrats are 60 seats up on their 2019 performance – a triumph for their approach to tactical voting and target seats. They have beaten the modern high watermark set in 2005 of 62 seats.

It was the Lib Dems that did for Chalk and Keegan, and they comfortably took the Henley seat once held by Boris Johnson as well as other classic Tory seats like Chichester, North East Hampshire, and Bicester. They will now be the third party in parliament. As you might surmise from this video of Sir Ed Davey dancing wildly to Sweet Caroline, it was a night on which almost nothing appears to have gone wrong. Another reason for optimism: if the Tories do tack towards Reform, it seems unlikely that many of the voters who appreciated Davey’s mixture of social care policy and extreme sports will be going back.

Reform | A big night – but not quite the earthquake it appeared

It was a rollercoaster night for the hardline rightwing party: the exit poll had them at a stunning 13 seats, but that number now looks like a significant overestimate, and it currently has just four. But, again, expectations: four seats (taken by Nigel Farage, party chair Richard Tice, defected Tory Lee Anderson, and former Southampton FC chairman Rupert Lowe) is enough to make an awful lot of noise.

Their strength was apparent early: in Houghton and Sunderland, a 16% Brexit party vote in 2019 became a 29% Reform vote. In Blyth and Ashington, a 9% Brexit party vote five years ago turned into a 27% Reform vote. And in Sunderland Central, a 12% Brexit party vote is now a 27% Reform vote.

There might be a smidgen of relief in not taking quite so many – at one point, one of those the party was predicted to win was a candidate who they had disowned over flagrant racism. Farage himself won comfortably in Clacton, taking 21,225 votes against Conservative Giles Watling’s 12,820.

The party won those four seats with a comfortably higher vote share than the Liberal Democrats, and will undoubtedly emphasise the distortions of the first past the post system in the years ahead. They dealt many killer blows to Conservative incumbents even where they didn’t win – and piled up a lot of second places. That is likely to be consequential, because dozens of MPs will be conscious that the greatest electoral pressure they face is from the right.

SNP | Wipeout and a long road back

It was a terrible night for John Swinney’s party, which suffered a fate that was somewhat analogous to the Tories’: punishment for dissatisfaction with an incumbent government, and apparent chaos in the leadership. But in Scotland, voters were also motivated by the prospect of voting in a Labour government, and that meant that the SNP fell from 44 seats to 8 – all but wiping out the huge gains made in 2015. Privately, the party had hoped to hang on to about 20.

Labour flipped all six SNP seats in Glasgow, while the party was also wiped out in Edinburgh. Stephen Flynn, the party’s leader in Westminster, did hold on to his seat comfortably – and the outgoing Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross was beaten by the SNP’s Seamus Logan in Aberdeenshire North and Moray East.

Swinney apologised to his colleagues but sought to cast his leadership as a long-term project to repair the damage of recent years. “You don’t recover from those tough times in an instant,” he said. “We’ve not managed to recover from them during this election campaign.”

The subplots | Green triumph, DUP disaster, and this outfit

The Greens had a triumphant night, with similarly effective seat targeting to the Lib Dems, and achieving the same number of seats as Reform – four – with less than half the number of votes. Plaid Cymru have doubled their seat tally in Wales to four.

In Northern Ireland, the DUP is on track to lose three of its eight seats, leaving Sinn Fein first among the parties there. Ian Paisley suffered a stunning defeat for the party to the Traditional Unionist Voice, losing a seat held by his family since 1970.

Jeremy Corbyn won. Tory chair and “chicken runner” Richard Holden won by just 20 votes after a recount. George Galloway lost and left before the result. Then there were the stranger moments: Nadine Dorries and Alistair Campbell’s obvious antipathy on Channel 4, Wes Streeting’s insanely long metaphor about ships, and the above incredible outfit on a returning officer in Blyth.

The front pages

The papers are, predictably, consumed with election results – and the language hardened between editions as the night wore on and the exit poll was replaced with real results. A full round-up is here. The Guardian’s headline is “Labour landslide” – the same as the Telegraph and the i. The Times runs with “Labour surges towards landslide election win”. In the Mail it’s “Labour set for historic landslide”. The FT says “Labour sweeps to power in landslide”. All have a picture of Keir Starmer and his wife, Victoria, walking hand in hand.

The Mirror goes for a play on words with “Keir we go”. In the Sun, a colourful “Britain sees red” as it reports on the exit polls too – that later updated to a picture of the Starmers grinning with the headline “Winner by smiles”. But in the Express, it’s “Tory big beasts lose seats in brutal election bloodbath”.

Three more big stories

Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings

Bored at work?

And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until Monday.

Quick crossword

Cryptic crossword

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