UK exit polls indicate huge Labour win: Keir Starmer will be PM by Monday

With voting concluded in the United Kingdom on Thursday evening, exit polls suggest that the Labour Party, which has been out of power since 2010, has won a large majority — although perhaps not quite as overwhelming a majority as some recent forecasts predicted. Exit polling in Britain is conducted by a consortium of major broadcasters, including the BBC and ITV, and is generally viewed as systematic and reliable.

It has been a foregone conclusion for weeks that Keir Starmer, the moderate who has led Labour for the last four years, following the crushing defeat suffered by left-wing legend Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, would become the next prime minister. That much is now certain, but many other questions about the 2024 general election will remain unanswered until the early hours of Friday morning.

Those questions include whether outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who for now will remain leader of the Conservative Party, can hold his seat; how many seats far-right dissident Nigel Farage and his anti-immigrant Reform UK party will win; how badly the Scottish National Party will suffer amid Labour’s resurgence; and whether Corbyn, who has been expelled from the Labour Party, can win his longtime London seat as an independent.

Exit polls released just after 10 p.m. British time on Thursday night suggest that Labour will win somewhere around 410 seats in the 650-seat House of Commons, a net gain of 209. That would be a nearly unprecedented electoral swing, creating one of the largest parliamentary majorities in British history. Some of the most optimistic pro-Labour commentators had spoken of an even bigger win, somewhere north of 450 seats, but no one in Starmer’s party is likely to express disappointment at this historic turnaround.

To a great extent, the real story here will be the crashing defeat suffered by the Tories (i.e., Conservatives), the most successful center-right political party in any Western-style liberal democracy. According to exit polling, they are likely to lose at least 200 of their current 344 seats — most of those to Labour, but quite a few to the centrist Liberal Democrats, a party that seemed doomed to irrelevance after a series of electoral setbacks and political failures but now seems to be mounting a comeback. 

Vote counting goes fairly quickly after a British election — it’s a relatively compact island nation with only one time zone — and final results should be available by early Friday morning, U.S. time. There is almost no transition period, in the American sense: Starmer will likely assume the prime minister’s office on Monday, after the election results are confirmed and he pays a ritual visit to King Charles.