Anatomy of an earthquake: how Labour rose and Tory dominoes fell

A mild-mannered man, courteous to the end towards the Labour MP who had just taken his seat in Swindon South, Sir Robert Buckland simply could no longer hold in his anger at what was left of his party.

He was thoroughly fed up with the endless “jockeying for position” and those colleagues who said things they “know to be untrue”. At a little after midnight, the former justice secretary had been the first Conservative MP to lose his seat in the Labour landslide – and he was spitting.

Related: Penny Mordaunt and Grant Shapps lose seats as Tories face ‘electoral armageddon’

The former home secretary Suella Braverman had shown “astonishing indiscipline” in criticising Rishi Sunak on the eve of the poll, he said. The party would fall into the abyss if it elevated such characters to its leadership. Did those squabbling now over Sunak’s job not see that it was a case of “bald men arguing over a comb”?

It was the first scream of frustration from a pack of Conservative party leading lights swallowed up in the cratering of the Tory vote across the country.

Labour was on course to better the 145-seat majority enjoyed by Clement Attlee in 1945 or the 144 seats that secured a second term in office for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1983. It was devastating – an electoral “Armageddon”, Buckland conceded – but the Labour party’s officer class were on strict orders to stifle their understandable delight, for now.

Angela Rayner, seemingly destined to be deputy prime minister, had barely offered a smile when she was asked to respond at 10pm to the exit poll forecast of a Labour majority of 170.

“We understand the weight on our shoulders … and I would say to the people of this country: I will always put you first, and I will fight really hard every day to turn things around,” she said.

Peter Mandelson, a key architect of Tony Blair’s historic victory in 1997, had been less reserved. “An electoral meteor has now struck planet Earth,” he said.

The exit poll, which has not been significantly wrong since 1992 when it falsely pointed to a hung parliament rather than a majority for John Major, suggested that Labour had won an estimated 410 seats in the 650-seat parliament, and a majority just nine short of the 179 won in 1997.

Watching television in his constituency home in Richmond, North Yorkshire, Sunak learned that the Conservatives looked likely to win just 131 seats although the number was later revised up a little. It was still expected to be the worst result since 1906.

There was no sign of the prime minister in the first hours of the morning. But he tweeted: “To the hundreds of Conservative candidates, thousands of volunteers and millions of voters: Thank you for your hard work, thank you for your support, and thank you for your vote.”

Could it really be as bad as forecast? As the hours passed, the broad strokes of the projection appeared to be well founded.

The Conservative Steve Baker, an ardent Brexiter, was told he had a 1% chance of keeping his seat in Wycombe. “I will be swept away in a few hours and many of your viewers will be cheering,” he conceded.

Hundreds more blue dominoes were to fall. As he was booted out of Welwyn Hatfield, Grant Shapps, the outgoing defence secretary, admitted his party had “tried the patience of the voters” with its “endless soap opera”.

The former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg lost his 15,000 majority in North East Somerset and Hanham, as the Tory chair, Richard Holden, endured a recount in Basildon and Billericay, a seat into which he had been parachuted shortly before the election as it had been regarded as a certain win. He won by just 20 votes.

In Cannock Chase, the former Tory chair Amanda Milling suffered an unprecedented 40% drop in her vote, wiping out her 19,879 majority and handing the seat to Labour.

The education secretary, Gillian Keegan, the justice secretary, Alex Chalk, and the veterans minister, Johnny Mercer, were also rejected by the electorate. The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, narrowly held his seat in Godalming and Ash but admitted it was a “crushing defeat” for the Conservatives.

The leader of the Commons, Penny Mordaunt, a potential leadership candidate, was out, as was the former deputy prime minister Thérèse Coffey.

Then there was Liz Truss, the former prime minister of 49 days whose legacy proved so toxic for the party. Rumours had swirled that the constituents of South West Norfolk had turned with a vengeance. Shortly before 7am, it was confirmed. Labour had reversed Truss’s 26,000 majority. It was quickly dubbed 2024’s “Portillo moment”, in reference to Michael Portillo’s surprise loss in 1997.

“You have voted; it is now time for us to deliver,” said Keir Starmer, by now the prime minister-in-waiting, as the Labour leader was returned to his constituency of Holborn and St Pancras.

If it was Labour profiting from the Tory collapse, it was, however, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK that appeared to be doing much of the damage, biting huge chunks out of the Conservative vote. It was enjoying an extraordinary night in its own right, gaining what the deputy leader, Ben Habib, described as a “bridgehead” in parliament, with the exit poll forecasting it would win up to 13 seats.

Farage romped home in Clacton, with an 8,405 majority, as did Richard Tice, Reform’s chair, in Boston and Skegness. “It’s over 30 years ago that I fought my first parliamentary byelection,” Farage said. “Something very fundamental is happening.”

Prof Sir John Curtice, the psephologist who led the team that produced the exit poll, suggested that his team was least confident about the seat figures for Reform UK and for the SNP in Scotland, which was said to be on track for just 10 seats, damaging its claims of a “mandate for independence”.

Dan Jarvis, the Labour MP since 2011 in Barnsley North and shadow minister of state for security, held his seat despite the exit poll suggesting he was 99% sure of losing it. Reform UK’s expected tally would be revised down to four as results came in. But there was ample evidence through the night that Reform had been picking up huge numbers of votes from both Labour and the Conservatives, coming second in a host of seats.

“This, folks, is huge,” Farage said, noting that there were two results in the north-east of England that put Reform on 30% of the vote. “It is almost unbelievable,” he said.

Shortly after 2am, Lee Anderson had become the first Reform UK candidate to win a seat on the night, securing a 5,509 majority, and a 34-point swing from the Conservatives. “I want my country back,” Anderson said.

The rise of Reform UK and what appeared to be the lowest turnout since 2005 will be cause for concern in years to come for those in the centre ground of British politics, but the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, was unable to contain his glee as the exit poll suggested he would be leading a cohort of MPs four or five times that of the 11 MPs returned in 2019.

He said: “The Liberal Democrats are on course for our best results in a century, thanks to our positive campaign with health and care at its heart.”

Plaid Cymru in Wales also enjoyed the night, winning Ynys Môn (Anglesey) and Caerfyrddin (Carmarthen) from the Tories, while the Greens won a record four seats, after taking a single one in 2019.

George Galloway, the leader of the Workers party, lost his seat in Rochdale to Paul Waugh, the Labour candidate and a former political journalist. “He’s repellent,” said a relieved Neil Kinnock of Galloway as the news broke. But not everything went Labour’s way. Jeremy Corbyn, standing as an independent, easily beat the party’s candidate in Islington North. And Jonathan Ashworth, the shadow paymaster general, lost his Leicester South seat to an independent.

For the Conservatives, the former leader William Hague, a close friend of Sunak, who inherited his constituency seat, struggled to find anything to cheer. The party would “just about” be able to mount an effective opposition, he said.

Sunak broke his silence with a short statement after securing his seat at 4.40am. “The Labour party has won this election,” he said. He had already conceded in a call with Starmer, the outgoing prime minister added. At a rally soon after, Starmer said that the British people would wake up on 5 July with a “weight lifted, a burden removed”.

“There is no dressing it up,” said the former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson. “This is a massacre.”