Keir Starmer’s Labour Party is projected to win the U.K. general election with a huge majority, a result that would reflect a seismic realignment in British politics as Rishi Sunak’s governing Conservatives imploded.

The official election exit poll predicted Labour will win 410 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons, the most since Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide victory, with a projected majority of 170. Sunak’s Tories are projected be slump to 131 seats, which would be their worst ever performance and would likely see some of the party’s biggest names voted out of Parliament. The Liberal Democrats and Nigel Farage’s populist Reform U.K. are also on track to make huge gains.

If the exit poll proves correct, Starmer is hours away from replacing Sunak as prime minister, completing what would be a remarkable turnaround since his left-wing predecessor Jeremy Corbyn led Labour to its worst performance in more than eight decades just five years ago.

When Starmer took over in 2020, it was assumed the Boris Johnson-led Tories would keep Labour out of power for at least another decade.

But Johnson’s administration collapsed under the weight of chaos and scandal, not least when he became the first sitting premier to be fined by the police over a rule-breaking party in Downing Street during the pandemic. His successor, Liz Truss, lasted 49 days — the shortest tenure in history but long enough to trigger a financial market meltdown. Since taking over in October 2022, Sunak — who had also been fined in the ‘Partygate’ scandal — failed to shake the sense that Britons had simply had enough.

It set the U.K. up for a massive political whiplash. Starmer capitalized on the Tory disarray by tacking to the political center ground, where British elections are traditionally won. He expelled Corbyn, and presented Labour as the party of economic stability. Rachel Reeves, a former Bank of England economist who is set to be the U.K.’s first female Chancellor of the Exchequer, has been central to Labour’s pitch for business to get behind Labour.

Markets have been sanguine in the face of a projected Labour victory, sending gauges of volatility to near multi-year lows across currency and bond markets. The pound was little changed against both the dollar and the euro in the immediate aftermath of the exit poll.

“Nobody in 2019 would’ve imagined this was possible,” Peter Mandelson, a former Labour minister and key force behind the 1997 win, said on the BBC.

Labour went into election day with a 20-point lead in Bloomberg’s U.K. poll of polls, a rolling 14-day average using data from 11 polling companies. The gap to the Tories had barely narrowed since Sunak caught his own party by surprise when he called a snap summer vote rather than wait until the autumn.

The exit poll is different, based on a survey of tens of thousands of people after they have cast their ballots. That’s generally made it accurate, predicting 368 seats for the Tories in 2019 against the 365 they ultimately won. The 650 House of Commons seats will be declared overnight.

...continued

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.