Keir Starmer and his wife, Victoria, are greeted at his constituency count at Holborn and St Pancras.Leon Neal / Getty Images
The opposition Labour Party, after 14 years in the political wilderness, has handed a brutal defeat to the ruling Conservatives.
Party leader Keir Starmer is now certain to become prime minister in the coming hours, replacing his Conservative Party counterpart, Rishi Sunak, who has presided over one of the worst electoral losses in British political history.
“We did it,” Starmer told a cheering crowd in an early-morning speech in central London. “You voted for it and now it has arrived. Change begins now.”
He thanked voters, saying they had changed Britain.
“A weight has been lifted, a burden finally removed from the shoulders of this great nation, and now we can look forward again,” he said.
As election night rolled through the small hours, the scale of Labour’s win sharpened into focus. A reliable exit poll published late Thursday found Labour on course to win 410 seats — just eight short of its highest-ever total. The Conservatives were projected to win just 131 seats, which would be the worst result in its almost 200-year history.
Labour’s victory was confirmed at around 5 a.m. local time (12 a.m. ET) when it secured the 326 seats necessary for a parliamentary majority. The precise scale of its victory is still being figured out as vote counts continue throughout the country.
The polls indicated a catastrophic election for the Conservatives, who were projected to win the fewest seats in their history, at 131.
Unlike the U.S., Britain has no monthslong transition.
At some point Friday morning, Starmer will head to Buckingham Palace to be appointed prime minister by King Charles III, a formality in Britain’s constitutional monarchy.
Credit: NBC News
