Labour and Lib Dems swept aside as Conservatives take majority in parliament and leave Ukip and Greens with only one seat each

Britain’s political landscape was left transformed as a triumphant David Cameron hailed the sweetest ­victory of his career after defying his critics by securing the first Conservative working majority since 1992 and forcing three of his vanquished rival party leaders to resign in the space of two hours.

With the Conservatives winning an overall majority – confounding all the opinion poll predictions – Labour’s Ed Miliband, the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage of Ukip all announced their resignations in quick succession on Friday morning.

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In an election suffused with historical and political significance, the Tories won 331 seats, eight more than the 323 required for an overall majority, while Labour collapsed to 232, equivalent to its disastrous 1987 general election result. The Liberal Democrats were devastated across Britain, collapsing from 57 seats to eight, reminiscent of the Liberal party in the era of Jo Grimond. Its most senior ministerial figures – including Ed Davey, Danny Alexander, Simon Hughes, Vince Cable and David Laws – were ejected by an electorate that had lost trust in Clegg’s party.

In Scotland, Labour found its citadel sacked, securing one seat – Edinburgh South – in what had once been its heartland. The SNP took 56 of the 59 seats north of the border. Miliband saw his shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, and in West Yorkshire the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, cast into the wilderness in their prime.



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Cameron’s victory was all the more stunning because polls had suggested Labour and the Conservatives were neck and neck, and that Britain was heading for a nervy constitutional stalemate.

The triumph, paradoxically, means Cameron is more reliant on the support of his backbenchers than in the last government, when the combined strength of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition meant he enjoyed a stronger majority in the Commons.

In a bid to show continuity at the start of his second five-year term, he immediately announced his senior cabinet team would be left unchanged, with George Osborne reappointed chancellor, Philip Hammond the foreign secretary and ­Theresa May still home secretary.

After a bitter campaign that strained the sinews of the union, Cameron, speaking on the steps of Downing Street, promised to restore the Conservative party’s one-nation credentials and recommitted to holding an in-out EU referendum by 2017.

The prime minister said: “I want my party, and I hope a government I would like to lead, to reclaim a mantle that we should never have lost – the mantle of one nation, one United Kingdom.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In the final video of his Election 2015 series, John Harris experiences election night mayhem in Glasgow, as the SNP wins almost every seat in Scotland

He also adopted a more emollient tone than he had in the aftermath of the Scottish referendum last year, saying he wanted to bring together the nations of the United Kingdom. “I have always believed in governing with respect,” he said.



This was why, he said, he had offered devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland his plan was “to create the strongest devolved government anywhere in the world with important powers over taxation”.

Rather than dwelling on rights of the English, as he had in response to the no vote, he simply said briefly: “No constitutional settlement will be complete if it did not also offer fairness to England.”

But amid the moderation, Cameron will now have to start a large programme of spending cuts, including £12bn cuts in the welfare budget. Cameron’s triumph, Labour officials argued, was largely built on a barrage of warnings that a minority Labour government propped up by the Scottish National party would threaten the economic recovery, and leave Miliband as vulnerable prey to the demands of the SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon. The warnings prevented Labour winning a huge proportion of its target seats in the Midlands and the north-west.

Faced with the shocking result Miliband decided to quit, triggering a leadership election. Miliband said: “I take absolute and total responsibility for the result and our defeat at this election.”

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Of those Labour candidates who lost their seats or failed to win, he said: “They’re friends, colleagues and standard bearers for our party, they always have been and they always will be.”

He added: “We have come back before and this party will come back again.”

The Labour leadership election will be held under a near one-person-one-vote system that abolishes the old electoral college that gave the unions a third of the vote. Potential candidates include Yvette Cooper, Chuka Umunna, Andy Burnham, Dan Jarvis and Liz Kendall. Harriet Harman will act as caretaker leader, but will also resign as deputy leader.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nick Clegg resigned and said history would judge his party more kindly than voters had this election. Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

But right across the party there were calls for a brutal far-reaching debate about the direction of the party, including for Labour to reconnect with the aspiring middle class and put as much emphasis on wealth creation as wealth distribution. Ed Miliband’s brother David said: “Deep and honest thinking is required to rebuild progressive politics.”

Jim Murphy, the Scottish Labour party leader who lost his seat, vowed to stay on to fight the SNP in 2016 Scottish parliamentary elections, saying that five months as leader was not enough time to turn around the party’s fortunes. “We have been overwhelmed by history and by circumstance. We make no excuses – a party can never blame the electorate – but we found ourselves hit by the perfect storm.”

He added: “We were hit by two nationalisms. A Scottish nationalism reassuring people that they could vote SNP and get Labour. And an English nationalism stoked up by David Cameron: warning vote Labour and get SNP.

“Unsurprisingly, forced into an artificial contest between English nationalism and Scottish nationalism, many Scots, including many no-voting Scots, chose the SNP. And let’s be clear: it wasn’t just in Scotland that the SNP cost Labour votes.”

In a day of dignified concession speeches, Clegg conceded that the results were “one of the most crushing blows to the Liberal Democrats since our party was founded”.

He defended his decision to join the coalition in 2010, saying it had been right to save the country at a time of national economic crisis. “It’s easy to imagine that there is no road back, but there is because there is no path to a fairer, greener, freer Britain without British liberalism showing the way,” he said. “This is a very dark hour for our party but we cannot and will not allow decent liberal values to be extinguished overnight.

“Fear and grievance have won, liberalism has lost, but it is more precious than ever and we must keep fighting for it,” he said.

The two obvious frontrunners to succeed him are Norman Lamb, who is close to Clegg politically, and Tim Farron, the darling of the party conference but less experienced in office. An angry leftwing contingent in the party are bound to demand a shift away from the centre, saying they had warned Clegg repeatedly he was marching the party towards annihilation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigel Farage resigned following his failure to be elected to parliament. Photograph: Rex

The Ukip leader Nigel Farage, thwarted in his bid to become MP for South Thanet, said he was personally relieved by defeat. He said his party, which finished second in a swath of constituencies in the north of England held by Labour, had become the party of young, working women. Although Farage offered his resignation, asking Suzanne Evans to become temporary leader, he said he would take a holiday and see if his party wanted him to return to the leadership in the autumn.

“There hasn’t been a single day since 1994 that hasn’t been dominated by Ukip,” he said. “I have tried to mix that with family, I tried for nine years to mix it with running my own business.



“It really has been seven days a week, totally unrelenting, and occasionally let down by people who perhaps haven’t always said and done the right things. So I feel a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders.”