UK election live news: Tories braced for ‘massacre’ as early results herald landslide win for Labour | General election 2024

This is what a Lib Dem spokesperson is saying about Chichester, where the party is confident it has beaten Gillian Keegan, the education secretary.

Chichester is going Lib Dem orange, as Gillian Keegan becomes the first Cabinet Minister of the night to lose her seat.

The Conservatives have let down the people of Chichester for too long. This seat has been Conservative for 100 years and a win here for the Liberal Democrats is an extraordinary achievement which has unseated the education secretary.

Keegan had a majority of 21,490 at the last election over the Lib Dems. Since then the boundaries have changed, but the new boundaries were marginally more favourable to the Tories, not less. Under the new boundaries, it is estimated the Tories would have been on 59% at the last election (not 58% – its actual share of the vote) and the Lib Dems would have been on 20% (not 23%), according to the Guardian’s guide to the boundary changes.

The Liberal Democrats’ Tom Gordon has won Harrogate & Knaresborough, the party’s first victory of the night.

The full results from PA media are:

Tom Gordon (LD) 23,976 (46.05%)
Andrew Jones (C) 15,738 (30.23%)
Jonathan Swales (Reform) 5,679 (10.91%)
Conrad Whitcroft (Lab) 4,153 (7.98%)
Shan Oakes (Green) 1,762 (3.38%)
Paul Haslam (Ind) 620 (1.19%)
Stephen Metcalfe (ND) 136 (0.26%)
LD maj 8,238 (15.82%)
Notional 15.82% swing C to LD
6.20% boundary change
Electorate 77,970; Turnout 52,064 (66.77%)
2019 notional: C maj 8,787 (15.82%) – Turnout 55,543 (73.28%)
C 28,873 (51.98%); LD 20,086 (36.16%); Lab 5,349 (9.63%); Others
1,208 (2.17%); Green 27 (0.05%)

Lisa O’Carroll

Labour sources tell the BBC they are quietly confident of four of the five seats in Fife.

Former leader of Labour in Scotland Jim Murphy says the projected results for Scotland overall are “double jeopardy” for the SNP “because not only have they lost votes to Labour directly but they lost votes to non voters. And in politics, it’s much harder to re-energise people who have left and gone to be non voters.”

Josh Halliday

I’m in Burnley, in the heart of Lancashire’s red wall, where Labour is on course to regain a seat it lost to the Tories in 2019 – the first time the town had elected a Conservative MP since 1910.

Throughout the campaign Burnley was billed as Labour’s most winnable seat. It needed the tiniest of swings to sweep away Tory incumbent Antony Higginbotham’s fragile majority of 1,532.

But on the ground – far removed from the opinion polls – the mood was rather different. As I reported four weeks ago, the Liberal Democrats sensed a huge upset as it won the backing of a large portion of Burnley’s Muslim community which had deserted Labour in significant numbers over Sir Keir Starmer’s position on Gaza.

A Labour source told me earlier today that the result in Burnley was looking “close”, with Labour’s candidate Oliver Ryan on around 33% of the vote with the rest split equally among the rest.

Gordon Birtwistle, the Liberal Democrat candidate (and former MP), just told me that the result “seems positive”. He believes he has hoovered up the vast majority of votes from the Muslim community, which could total around 11,000. “I’ve just watched one box being opened when I had all the votes bar four,” he said.

Another Liberal Democrat source said the Conservatives “are doing better than you would expect” in Burnley, and Reform were also picking up votes from Labour.

With at least an hour to go until the result, we’ve just been given the official turnout for Burnley: it’s a very low 53.2% – about seven percentage points down from 2019. That’s similar to what has happened across England so far and is a story in itself.

Prof Sir John Curtice, the psephologist who led the team that produced the exit poll, said early results are consistent with widespread expectations of a low turnout.

Speaking to the BBC, Curtice said:

We may discover we are heading towards one of the lower turnouts of general elections in postwar electoral history.

He noted that there was “not that much difference between Conservative and Labour in much of what they were offering the electorate”.

The lowest general election turnout since 1918 was in 2001, when it was 59.4%. The highest was in 1950, when it was 83.9%. For most of the postwar period turnout was regularly in the 70s, or higher, and in 1997 it was 71.4%. But it has never returned to those levels since the sharp fall in 2001. At the last election it was 67.3%, down by 1.5 percentage points compared with 2017 (68.8%). Full figures are available in this House of Commons library briefing paper.

Lisa O’Carroll

Polling guru John Curtice cautioned that the exit poll projections for Scotland should be taken with a “great deal of caution”.

On the BBC website he said the poll only included a few sample points in Scotland leaving projections less robust there. He wrote on the BBC website:

If the poll has even slightly overestimated Labour’s advantage over the SNP, the latter’s tally could end up being higher.

The forecast for the SNP – and for Scotland in general, where the exit poll is pointing to substantial Labour gains – must thus be treated with a great deal of caution.

Steven Morris

It’s looking increasingly like a near-wipeout for the Tories in Wales. Labour insiders are – cautiously – saying they believe they are on course to take seats from the Tories such as Wrexham in north Wales and the Vale of Glamorgan in the south.

The leader of the Tories in the Senedd, the Welsh parliament, Andrew RT Davies, has expressed anger at the timing of the election. The chair of the party in Wales, Tomos Dafydd Davies, has suggested the Tories need to develop a “robust brand” of their own in Wales.

Craig Williams, who was embroiled in the scandal over the placing of bets on the date of the election, may just win in Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr. However the Tories withdrew support from him so he will sit as an independent.

It isn’t all good news for Labour. The exit poll suggests its share of the vote in Wales is down by 2%, perhaps a sign that controversies that have swirled around the first minister, Vaughan Gething, are cutting through.

Plaid Cymru has had a good campaign with the profile of its leader, Rhun ap Iorwerth, boosted by impressive appearances on television and radio debates and interviews. But its members are playing down its prospects, believing it may end up with only two MPs. It had hoped for four.

Reform UK is not expected to win any seats in Wales but it thinks its vote share will be large in some areas, which could provide it with a foothold for the 2026 Senedd elections where there will be proportional representation rather than first-past-the-post.