Britain’s new political landscape: what the voting numbers tell us
Politics professor Rob Ford crunched the numbers with a team of experts to produce the devastatingly accurate exit poll. Here, he details how the 10pm figures foretold a night of horror for Labour
The exit poll stunned us all again. In 2017 it raised the curtain on a night of humiliation for Theresa May and the Conservatives and triumph for Labour and Jeremy Corbyn. This time the roles were reversed. Boris Johnson succeeded where May failed, mobilising Leave voters’ frustration at Brexit deadlock to secure the largest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher’s third victory in 1987, and the largest share of the vote (44%) won by any party since Thatcher’s first win in 1979. Corbyn secured a “glorious defeat” in the summer of 2017, when a surge in Labour support saw the party advance in defiance of expectations of disaster.
The defeat this time was not glorious. Labour fell everywhere, but the party collapsed in its northern and Midlands heartlands where voters have returned Labour MPs for generations. The “red wall” collapsed, and Corbyn’s party was left to pick through the rubble of its worst defeat in more than 80 years.