Gradually, then suddenly. That is how Ernest Hemingway famously described a character’s bankruptcy. That was how the 14-year Tory hegemony of Britain came to a brutal end.
If the exit poll released on the stroke of 10pm is even half right, this is less a changing of the executive, more a punishment beating – and one that is well deserved. A 170-seat majority for Keir Starmer and his refashioned Labour party, which is projected to land 410 seats. A drubbing for the Tories, pegged back to 131.
The Tory party has never suffered a defeat like it. It poses big questions for the most successful party in British history. The stakes are existential. It may not survive.
And the miserable news for Tories into the wee small hours is that it will almost certainly be more than half right. Prof John Curtice and his team are the bedrock of these projections and he got it right in 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019. No one stole this election. The Tories faced the electorate and, via the ballot box, faced its wrath.
As for Labour and its leader, a day and a night of extraordinary achievement and vindication. It will command the political landscape with hundreds of new MPs, its leader endowed with huge authority to impose his will on the country and his party. It will be power he must use wisely, perhaps magnanimously. There will be too many genuine battles ahead to engage in fights that need not be had. There will be celebrations and then the ministerial appointments will start tomorrow. That may be time to set a course that the vast majority of his party and those who wish him well can follow.
Of course, he is not the only winner. The mission statement as the electorate trooped to the polling booths appeared to be anyone but those Tories. Ed Davey swam and ran and jumped and gurned and pulled every stunt he could for airtime and a hearing from the public, and has been rewarded with what could be 61 seats, an increase of 46, most surely seized from the Tories. The Liberal Democrats are back as the third party after the grim post-Clegg and post-coalition years.
The Greens look like doubling their tally, compensating for the loss of Caroline Lucas with two MPs. Plaid Cymru also increases its tally to four.
A sobering night for the SNP, initially projected to lose 33 seats, many to Labour, shorn to only 10. If true, that is an electoral meteorite that resets the party battle in Scotland, kills the independence campaign for years and offers Scotland a new devolved political identity.
The rejection of the Tories appears to have been from all sides. Early returns suggest Reform could take 13 seats from a standing start. If that is true, here is another count for the Tory charge sheet. The modern party’s preoccupation with nativist politics opened the door to Nigel Farage, who is even more comfortable in the toxic well than they are.
It has been a dispiriting election in so many ways, with key issues hardly explored, trite rows exaggerated and a doomed Tory party seeking to save itself with recycled policies, divisive rhetoric and further embrace of the rightwing ideology that has dragged a historic party – the erstwhile “party of government” – away from its guiding philosophies.
It was an election designed by the Tories and their outriders in the rightwing media to be cynical and divisive. That was their best hope for salvation, or to at least limit the scale of destruction.
But the projections are out and what is clear is a wholesale rejection by the electorate of a tired, rudderless, amoral government: the latest in a sequence of governments that have left the country much worse than they found it. Gradually, then suddenly, brutally.
Hugh Muir is the Guardian’s executive editor, Opinion
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