Centrist former MPs who abandoned the two main parties over what they said were their swings to extremes have all failed to be re-elected to parliament.

The four who stood for the Independent Group for Change – the former Conservative MP Anna Soubry, and the former Labour MPs Gavin Shuker, Chris Leslie and Mike Gapes – all lost their seats to candidates in their former parties on Thursday night.

Amid a sweep of Tory gains, the former Conservative ministers David Gauke, Dominic Grieve and Anne Milton, all of whom stood as independents after they had the whip removed for voting in parliament to a block a no-deal Brexit, also lost their seats.

The veteran politician Frank Field, who resigned from Labour this summer, lost in Birkenhead. The former Labour MPs who joined the Liberal Democrats – Chuka Umunna, Luciana Berger and Angela Smith – and former Tories to join the party – Sarah Wollaston, Sam Gyimah, Phillip Lee and Antoinette Sandbach – all failed to win.

Speaking ahead of the results in his constituency of Beaconsfield, Dominic Grieve told Sky News that he did not expect to win against the Conservative candidate. “It is a pretty tall order anyway to take on a 25,000 Conservative majority that I built up over 22 years, and the area is deeply Conservative,” he said.

Asked why he had bothered to run, Grieve said: “Because it was a debate which was well worth having and has to be had, and indeed this election is not going to resolve it; if anything, it shows an even higher polarisation.

“But I am very worried about our country’s future, I think it’s at serious risk, both in the quality of life of its citizens and indeed our future as a United Kingdom.”

After losing his seat in Nottingham East, Chris Leslie tweeted: “We warned this would happen. We tried everything we could to prevent the hard-left self-indulgence within the Labour party. And now the country will pay the price. I’m so sorry too few within Labour took a stand with us, when it would have mattered.”

Tweeting after the exit poll, Mike Gapes said he had been a Labour candidate in Ilford North in 1983 when under “the decent patriotic Michael Foot we had a terrible result”. “It looks like Corbyn will drag Labour down to an even worse result than 1983 tonight,” he said.

Leslie and Gapes were among the eight Labour MPs to quit the party in February citing the party’s Brexit policy and the leadership’s record on tackling antisemitism. They were later joined by three Conservative MPs, Anna Soubry, Sarah Wollaston and Heidi Allen. Wollaston and Allen later joined the Liberal Democrats, before the latter stood down as an MP.

Frank Field, who resigned the Labour whip over antisemitism in the party in August, stood in the Merseyside constituency he had represented since 1979 under the mantle of the newly formed Birkenhead Social Justice party. He lost to the Labour candidate Mick Whitley by 17,705 votes.

Speaking to the Liverpool Echo, Field wished his successor well but said he had a “mega job” to do. “Any one of those shadow cabinet [members] would have put forward a programme that Attlee and other Labour prime ministers would have been proud of and won,” he said. “Boris Johnson holds the key to No 10 courtesy of Jeremy Corbyn.”