U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party was on track early Friday to win an overwhelming parliamentary majority in Britain’s general election, as Labour Party strongholds across the country swung dramatically to the Tories — and immediately led left-wing Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to announce his intention to step down.
Initial exit polls predicted that Johnson’s Conservative Party would win 368 seats in the country’s 650-seat lower chamber, while Labour would pick up just 191 seats — which would give the Tories a majority of 86. As the night went on, U.K. broadcasters updated their forecasts to suggest that that majority could be slightly lower, possibly around a 76-seat majority.
Whatever the eventual number will be, it will mark a significant victory for the Tories, and a historic drubbing for the Labour Party of a kind they haven’t seen since the 1930s.
The night saw shock after shock as traditional Labour areas such as Burnley, Redcar, Stoke-on-Trent and Wrexham — with some seats that have been held by the party for decades — turn to the Conservatives. Many of those seats, often in working-class areas, had voted in favour of Britain’s departure from the European Union in 2016 and had soured at the Labour Party’s anti-Brexit stance
Johnson had called an early election to break the deadlock over Brexit, asking the British public to give him a majority so he could get his withdrawal agreement — negotiated with the E.U. — through the chamber, where it previously had been rejected. His message to voters tired of the drama since the 2016 referendum was simple: “Get Brexit done.”
As the results came in, Johnson declared that his party had been given “a powerful new mandate.”
“I’d like to thank the people of this country for voting in a December election that we didn’t want to call, but that I think has turned out to be an historic election that gives us now…a chance to respect the democratic will of the British people, to change this country for the better and to unleash the potential of the entire people of this country and this is what we will now do,” he said.
Johnson faced off against Corbyn’s Labour Party, which had struggled to lay out a clear vision for Brexit, backing a possible second referendum while also promising to get a new deal with the E.U. — but with Corbyn not committing to supporting that eventual deal.