What happened
Britain’s center-left Labour Party won Thursday’s national election in a landslide, unseating the Conservatives after 14 years of increasingly tumultuous rule. Labour claimed at least 412 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, making Keir Starmer the next prime minister.
With two seats left to tally, the Conservatives had won just 121 seats, the party’s poorest showing ever. Several prominent Tories lost their reelection bids, including Defense Secretary Grant Shapps, Commons leader Penny Mordaunt, Brexit champion Jacob Rees-Mogg and the previous prime minister, Liz Truss. The new hard-right, anti-immigrant Reform UK took four seats, with leader Nigel Farage becoming a member of Parliament on his eighth try.
Who said what
“Change begins now,” Starmer, 61, told supporters after Labour reached the 326 seats required for a governing majority. “Thank you, truly — you have changed our country.” Outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he had called Starmer to congratulate him on his win after British voters “delivered a sobering verdict.”
Since Brexit, “politics in Britain has been a clown show, and today, its voters decided it was time for the circus to move on,” Helen Lewis said at The Atlantic. Starmer’s government will have a “commanding majority but a demoralizing inbox” of economic problems to tackle, while the Tories “spend the next few days asking what the hell went wrong,” perhaps taking solace in the fact that their loss was more a “punishment for their incompetence” than a “defeat for their ideology.”
What next?
Sunak said he would tender his resignation to King Charles III at Buckingham Palace this morning. The king would then ask Starmer to form the next government. The new prime minister should be in 10 Downing Street by around midday Friday.