Last week, British voters cast their ballots to overwhelmingly reject the Conservative Party which had governed the United Kingdom over the course of the last 14 years, a period which saw six prime ministers. Rather than a simple narrative of a Labour landslide and a Tory defection, however, the real story of what happened is much more complicated.
The Conservatives Took a Drubbing
Few expected the Conservatives to do well when this election was called. The party has not led a single poll since the start of 2022, and has often trailed by 20% or more. There was some speculation within the media, and hope among Conservative supporters, that the polls would somehow narrow during an election campaign as voters contemplated the alternatives, including a Labour Party about which few felt any enthusiasm.
While those predicting that Labour’s support was soft were ultimately vindicated, as I explain below, it came as cold comfort to the Conservatives.
Rather than increasing their support, the Conservatives saw it plummet during a campaign which seemed to careen from blunder to disaster. From a rain-soaked launch, to Rishi Sunak skipping out on D-Day commemorations, to a scandal in which several senior Conservative staffers and MPs appear to have used inside knowledge to bet on the date of the election, the campaign was almost universally regarded as a disaster.
By the end, the party had abandoned all pretense of bidding for victory. With polls showing them falling into the mid-teens, they began desperately warning of the dangers presented by a “Labour supermajority,” begging voters to take pity upon them.
In the end, their proportion of the vote fell from the 43.6% Boris Johnson won in 2019, to 23.7%, and they went from 365 seats to 121. They now face a Labour Party majority of 411 seats, with a revitalized Liberal Democratic party winning 72 seats, up from 11 in 2019. It is hard to put that in context, which did not stop analysts from trying.
The Conservative Party Suffered Their Worst Defeat Since…
Historians and commentators love historical comparisons. That is especially true in the United Kingdom, which is why the unprecedented extent of the Conservative drubbing left them without any functional analogies.
In vain, historians and media commentators have searched the archives for a date at which those self-identifying as “Tories” numbered fewer than the 121 they returned on Thursday, and identified none since the term came into use after the English Civil War in the 1660s. In short, since a group of Members of Parliament began identifying as “Tories,” or conservatives, they have never, at any point, numbered as low as 121.
Similarly, the 23.7% of the vote won by the party is historically low. In 1997, when Tony Blair won his landslide victory, the Conservatives managed 30.7% and nearly 9.6 million votes, delivering them 165 seats. In 2024, they won fewer than 6.9 million votes. There are more than a dozen seats which have delivered Conservative MPs since the modern party was founded in the 1830s that for the first time will be represented by another party.
Conservative losses extended to all wings of the party and throughout the entire country. More liberal Conservative Party members who supported remaining in the E.U. fell, along with those like Jacob-Rees Mogg who had championed departing. Liz Truss fell, as did Penny Mordaunt, the presumed future leader of the liberal wing of the party.
The survivors, too, were scattered randomly. Alicia Kearns, who on the floor of the House of Commons proclaimed to a right-wing gay MP that “You cannot take the T out of LGBT” survived, as did Iain Duncan Smith, a right-wing former leader from 2001-2003.
The irony is that it could have been worse.
The Conservatives Still Beat Expectations
As horrible as the results were, by the end of the campaign widespread expectations were that the Conservatives would do a good deal worse. Numerous polls had shown the party sliding into the mid-teens, in some cases tied with or even trailing Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. Party.
Meanwhile, the media had been flooded with MRP (Multi-level regression and post-stratification) polls which purported to model the results for each of the 650 individual seats by applying polling results to their specific demographics. The format had become famous in 2017 when a model used by the pollster YouGov predicted the Conservatives failing to win a majority when most normal polls indicated a comfortable victory for then-Prime Minister Theresa May, but their record in 2019 was dubious.
In 2024, new polls were released almost every other day, with models showing the Conservatives winning anywhere from 31 seats to 140 seats, which at the time was considered an outlier. The proliferation of models showing the Conservatives well below 100 seats led to a flood of stories about whether they might fall behind the Liberal Democrats as the official opposition. Nigel Farage, in promoting his own Reform Party, seized on these results.
More traditional targeting data from both parties was dismissed. The day before the election, the Conservative Central Office revealed that they viewed 80 seats as safe and an additional 60 as tossups. In the end, this proved more accurate than public polls or models.
However, with the narrative having shifted to whether the Conservatives would manage to hold on to second place, or if Rishi Sunak would lose his own seat (he won by 25%), 23.7% and 121 seats looked “not that bad” to a media predicting 70 seats and 18% of the vote.
The Empty Labour Landslide
With 411 seats, new Prime Minister Kier Starmer’s 177-seat advantage is effectively equal to Blair’s 179-seat majority in 1997. For a party which won a mere 202 total seats in 2019, it is a stunning turnaround.
The victory, however, is bittersweet. While Blair won 418 seats with 43.6% of the vote, 13.6 million total votes, Starmer won his 411 seats with 33.7% of the vote, or 9.7 million total votes.
On the one hand, Labour’s success is a vindication of the strategy designed by Starmer and his team to focus almost entirely on driving down the Conservative Party’s support. It is also a vindication of the ruthlessness with which that strategy was pursued, which included forcing candidates in no-hope races to abandon their campaigns in favor of helping other seats, cutting off support if they refused. Labour ignored policy, promising to keep virtually all of the Conservative Party’s positions on spending as well as on restricting gender transition for minors and sex education in schools. Instead, they focused their campaign on competence.
On the other hand, Labour’s success shows the dangers of such a strategy. It ensured that those who needed to vote Labour to defeat the Conservatives did so, but it also gave no one who didn’t need to vote Labour to oust the Tories any motivation to support the party. The Labour vote share not only barely increased over 2019 (33.8% vs. 32.1%) but Labour won half a million fewer votes than Corbyn did five years ago.
These missing votes were felt in safe seats, where Labour majorities crashed. In 2019, Labour won more than 60% of the vote in 81 seats. In 2024, it did so in only two.
Starmer saw his support fall from 69% to 48% in his own London Constituency, while his presumed successor, now-Health Secretary Wes Streeting, beat a left-wing independent by a mere 500 votes. Two shadow ministers, who expected to join the cabinet, lost to independents running on a pro-Hamas platform in heavily Muslim seats, and others, such as Jess Philips, faced brutal campaigns in which tires were slashed and police protection required.
Labour’s strategy has empowered a radical, which almost ensures the party will, despite its large majority, be forced to pivot to calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, as most of its leading figures are vulnerable not to the right but the left.
Labour has won, but it has fragmented British politics and promoted sectarianism in the process.
Farage’s Breakthrough and Its Limits
It is not only on the left where politics has been fragmented. Nigel Farage, after more than two decades of trying, is now a member of Parliament. He will be joined by four colleagues who were also elected by his Reform U.K. Party. Five seats is a pale compensation for 14.3% of the electorate and 4.1 million votes, especially when the Liberal Democrats won 72 on 12.2%.
The outcome for Farage’s party is also a disappointment when compared to expectations. The same polls which showed the Conservatives tied with Reform led to dreams Farage’s party could potentially replace the Tories. This was always unrealistic for a party facing its first election, especially when Farage only decided to stand a week into the campaign, but it has led to a focus on what the party failed to accomplish rather than what it did accomplish.
In many of the working-class Labour seats of the northern “Red Wall” which had voted heavily for Brexit and elected Conservatives for the first time ever in 2019 after heeding Boris Johnson’s call to “get Brexit done,” Reform replaced the Conservatives as the major opposition party. Its candidates generally won between 25%-30%. This was not enough for seats, but it made clear that while Labour regained many of these seats, it did so without regaining the votes it lost in 2019.
A full discussion of where Reform goes from here would require its own follow-up article. Suffice to say that claims that Reform represents a new right-wing center ignores the regional nature of its support. Suggestions that it merely took protest votes from the Conservatives ignores the math. Its potential, if Farage dedicates himself to the hard task of party building, is of a regional party that can win MPs. That, then, would be its path to power.
The SNP Collapsed and the Liberals Surged
The story of the election was sectarian and ideological fragmentation, but not national fragmentation. That is apparent in the contrasting fates of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the Liberal Democrats. The SNP lost 39 of its 48 seats, having been rocked by leadership disputes.
The SNP has long been a coalition of Scottish Nationalists and left-wing activists who hate the Conservatives. Many more right-wing Scottish nationalists were willing to allow for left-wing policy if it secured left-wing votes for independence, but with independence increasingly off the table, they have begun to feel they are getting left-wing policy for nothing.
This growing rift broke into open intra-party conflict over transgender issues, including laws which would criminalize “misgendering.” In the process, the party failed to inspire confidence in voters. Its leverage in Westminster depended on being able to threaten, not support a Labour government, but that would require being open to working with the Conservatives, a line that contradicts its claim to be the best vehicle for opposing them.
In the end, Labour sold itself as the best bet to form a non-Conservative government, while the Conservatives and Liberals sold themselves as the best options for those who didn’t want a Labour government. Had it not been for the rise of Reform and the national tide, the SNP would have been entirely wiped out. Five of its nine remaining seats were won by less than three percentage points over the Scottish Conservatives.
The Liberal Democrats, by contrast, did not even run a national campaign. In 2010 they tried to paint themselves as a third option for government between the Conservatives and Labour and got crushed between them. In 2019 they claimed they would reverse Brexit if they formed the government, and failed to answer which party they would support if they did not come in first. In 2024, they merely ran local candidates where Labour was not viable and collected tactical votes. The party did not even run a real campaign, instead having their leader pull stunts like water skiing or being interviewed at a theme park.
Stunningly, it worked. With 72 seats, the Liberals are larger than at any time since 1923, and they did so while barely increasing their national vote share. But they did so by becoming what Reform is for working-class social conservatives and what the anti-Israel independents are for Muslims – a sectarian party of the wealthy suburban elite opposed to all planning reform and dedicated to keeping housing prices high and pensions higher.
Conclusion
The 2024 U.K. elections produced a lopsided Labour majority resting on the support of barely a third of the electorate – an electorate that is otherwise fragmented into interest groups. A Conservative recovery will require either integrating those interest groups or replacing Labour as the default party of government after it has exhausted itself in scandals.
It’s worth considering that in the end only 58% of voters supported the major parties this time. This fragmentation will continue as long as the major parties stand for nothing.
Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.
