Under bright, blustery skies across most of the UK, British voters went to the polls on Thursday to elect their fourth prime minister in five years, with Keir Starmer’s Labour party heavily tipped to win an overwhelming parliamentary majority and bring to an end 14 years of Conservative-led government.
After weeks of campaigning after Rishi Sunak’s surprise gamble to call a July election, he and the other party leaders cast their votes across the country while making their final appeals to the electorate.
Sunak voted early with his wife, Akshata Murty, in his home constituency of Richmond and Northallerton, urging voters on X to “stop the Labour supermajority which would mean higher taxes for a generation”.
Starmer, accompanied by his wife, Victoria, was met by a small group of supporters at a polling station in Kentish Town, north London. On social media, he repeated Labour’s campaign theme that “it is time for change”.
The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Ed Davey, the Green party co-leader, Carla Denyer, and party leaders in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland were also pictured at their constituencies.
Davey, whose campaign has been characterised by stunts including bungee jumps, water slides and Zumba dancing, paid tribute to his wife, saying: “Without my rock, Emily, I simply would not be on the ballot paper.”
Jeremy Corbyn, running against Labour in his north London constituency after being expelled by the party he formerly led, tweeted: “I just voted for the independent candidate in Islington North. I hear he’s alright.” The Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, posted a TikTok video of himself buying a drink in a Clacton pub.
With polling throughout the campaign consistently having shown the Conservatives well behind Labour, final predictions offered little last-minute consolation for Sunak’s party. YouGov’s final poll before ballots opened, published late on Wednesday, predicted a historic Labour landslide of 431 seats, on 39% of the total vote share, and an unprecedented Tory slump to 102 seats (on 22%).
YouGov’s predictions, if correct, would give Labour an enormous majority of 212 seats, dwarfing the winning margin of any British election since 1832.
Sunak has insisted his party can still win the election, despite several cabinet colleagues all but conceding defeat. Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, said this week that the “realistic position” was that Labour would triumph: “I live in the real world … Let’s not try and pretend black is white.”
It led to excitement among some of those eager to see the end of the Conservatives, with the broadcaster Carol Vorderman, an outspoken critic of the government, tweeting: “It feels like Christmas and the Tory turkey is about to get stuffed!” The Queen guitarist Brian May posted a video on Instagram of a polling station sign, writing: “This is a long-awaited chance to express … disgust at the ineptitude, arrogance and corruption that we have been forced to witness over the last decade … The sweet scent of liberation is in the air.”
The actor Tony Robinson shared a video of himself dancing en route to his local polling station, waving his passport as photo ID. He wrote: “Vote Today. Vote Change. Vote Labour.”
The Game of Thrones actor Charles Dance was photographed queueing to vote at a polling station in Kentish Town in Starmer’s constituency of Holborn and St Pancras. Others posted photographs of dogs, birds and even horses at their local polling stations.
But there was controversy over delays in sending out postal votes, with Kemi Badenoch, the business secretary, criticising Uttlesford district council in her North West Essex seat for leaving voters “potentially disenfranchised” after thousands of postal voters failed to receive their ballots.
Writing on X, Badenoch, who is tipped as a potential future Tory leader, said the council was “unable to carry out basic functions competently. Now they’ve potentially disenfranchised up to 2,600 postal voters by forgetting to send them their ballot papers.”
The local council’s chief executive, Peter Holt, said last week he was “mortified” and apologised for the error, saying ballots would be delivered by hand. But there are fears a close result on election night could be challenged if a large proportion are not returned.
Others shared their frustration with late arriving postal ballots. Lawrence Cheung, 62, who lives in France but is voting in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency, said he had been forced to entrust the envelope containing his vote to a Londoner who was returning on the Eurostar from Paris on Thursday morning, after his postal vote arrived too late.
Another voter, who gave her name only as Sarah, said she lived in Copenhagen but voted in Orpington, and applied for her vote on 25 May but only received it on 3 July, leaving her unable to vote.
“It’s a democratic right, it’s not some company delivering a bikini I’d ordered,” she said. “I’m cross – I really wanted to vote.”
The Association of Electoral Administrators, the body that represents electoral officers and administrators, said electoral legislation was no longer adequate, amid widespread reports of missing postal votes.
It said demands on the services had mounted, with elections delivered “in spite of rather than because of the fragmented framework of laws”.
Labour has won a number of significant endorsements, most notably from the Sun, which has claimed in the past that it could swing elections and was long feared by the party’s leaders as a result.
But the Times, the rightwing tabloid’s stablemate at Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, declined to follow suit on Thursday, saying Labour “has been sparing with the truth about what it will do in office and cannot expect an endorsement”.
The leader was met with scorn from a number of its readers online before comments were deleted altogether.
Sunak has been heavily criticised, including by his own side, for a gaffe-strewn campaign that caught many of his colleagues unprepared for a July election. A catastrophic campaign launch in the rain in Downing Street was followed by a series of own goals, most seriously when he left D-day commemorations early to take part in a television interview in which he would talk about being deprived of Sky TV as a child.
