Labour's landslide at Westminster

Polling stations across the United Kingdom closed at ten at night on 4 July, and by breakfast the next day the result was no longer in doubt. Labour, the main opposition party, had won a landslide, and Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, had stepped out in the dark to concede. Fourteen years of Conservative government were over, and Keir Starmer, a former barrister who had led Labour since 2020, was on his way to the palace to be asked to form a government. It was the first time the Labour Party had been returned to power in fourteen years, and the first change of government since the referendum that took Britain out of the European Union.

The final count gave Labour 411 seats in the House of Commons, comfortably beyond the 326 needed for a majority and the party’s strongest performance since Tony Blair’s victory in 1997. The Conservatives, by contrast, came back with 121 seats, the worst result in their two centuries as an organised party, a heavier defeat than even the dark years after 1997 when the party had seemed to be on the edge of breaking apart. The Liberal Democrats won 71 seats, their best showing in decades, and Reform UK, campaigning on the right, took a handful of seats of its own. The old two-party hold on Westminster, already loosening, came apart at the seams on the count board.

What stands out is how thin the popular mandate was for such a sweeping change. Labour took 411 seats with 33.7 per cent of the vote, the lowest winning share on record, and the Conservatives managed just 23.7 per cent. Turnout was 59.7 per cent, down sharply from 67.3 per cent in 2019 and the second-lowest figure since the vote was widened after the First World War, edged only by the low turnout of 2001. In seat after seat, voters stayed home in numbers large enough to matter, and the first-past-the-post system translated a modest national swing into a Commons majority of the size normally reserved for decisive victories.

Mr Sunak, who had called the election and staked his own record on it, gave the traditional concession speech outside his campaign headquarters in the early hours, congratulating Mr Starmer and taking responsibility for the defeat. He said he would stay on as a Member of Parliament and hand over the leadership of his party, leaving the Conservatives to choose a new leader who would not face the voters again for four or five years. Mr Starmer, for his part, arrived at Downing Street after daybreak and began by speaking of national service, national renewal and the long task ahead, striking a quieter note than the triumphant entries of Blair in 1997.

The scale of the win invites the question of what it is a mandate for. Labour campaigned on the waiting lists of the National Health Service, on the shortage of housing and on slow economic growth, and it won without ever needing to excite enthusiasm for itself; much of the vote was a vote against the outgoing government rather than for anything in particular. The new administration inherits the slow economy, the long waiting lists and the fractious politics that defeated the last one. Landslides, in Britain as elsewhere, look decisive from a distance and complicated up close, and the months ahead will test whether a government elected on a third of the vote can govern like one elected on half.