What's happening in the UK election

Sir Kier Starmer

Voting has ended and Britain’s Labour Party is projected to have won the UK’s general election with a landslide victory.

If the projection based on exit polls is correct, Sir Keir Starmer’s centre-left party will return to power with a large majority after 14 years of right-wing government under the Conservatives.

And Mr Starmer, a former chief prosecutor who only entered Parliament in 2015, will become the new UK prime minister on Friday after seeing the King at Buckingham Palace.

Current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, meanwhile, will have led the Conservatives to their worst result in decades.

Exit polls are not official result but they have proved increasingly accurate since the mid-1990s.

Now comes the process of confirming the result. It will be a long night of vote counting and there will undoubtedly be plenty of storylines to follow along the way.

Here's what you can expect, and what it means.

What happens now?

Like we said, the exit poll is not an official result but has in recent elections been a very reliable indicator of who will form the new government.

The UK runs a parliamentary system with 650 MPs, or members of parliament. Each of these represents an individual constituency - basically an area – somewhere in the country.

Labour is projected to win 410 seats, the Conservatives 131, the Liberal Democrats 61 and Reform 13. This result would give Labour a huge 170-seat majority.

Right now, election officials in each constituency will be busy counting votes, and at some point in the evening will declare their results. Whoever gets the most votes wins and becomes the MP.

Some local areas pride themselves on being among the first in the country to announce their winners. These results announcements – often held in school halls – are usually televised. All candidates – including those running as a joke – are present on stage.

So, on that note, watch out for Count Binface, who is challenging Mr Sunak in his northern English constituency.

When will we know the result?

That all depends. It will come when it's clear which party will hit the magic number of 326 seats.

That figure represents a majority in parliament, meaning the party has enough MPs to be able to pass laws without needing the help of any other party.

The leader of the party with the most MPs becomes prime minister, after the King officially invites them to form a government.

The leader of the party with the second highest number of MPs becomes what’s known as the leader of the opposition.

If the incumbent prime minister loses, the changeover is quick, compared to many other countries.

So if this exit poll is correct, Mr Sunak will probably be out of 10 Downing Street – the UK equivalent of the White House - within a day, with Mr Starmer installed soon after.

How did we get here?

In late May, facing a significant deficit in the polls, Rishi Sunak surprised many in his own party as well as political pundits by deciding to call a snap election, triggering a six-week election campaign.

The Conservatives have held power since 2010 and the country has seen five leaders in that time – including a tumultuous period in 2022 when the UK had three prime ministers in a matter of weeks.

For its part, Labour hasn’t won a general election since 2005 and its last result in 2019 under left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn was its worst for almost a century.

Keir Starmer sought to show voters during the campaign that the party had moved on, while calling for a change in government after a long period of Conservative government.

Mr Sunak, meanwhile, tried to sell the record of his party, and repeatedly warned voters against handing Labour a large majority.