FOURTEEN years of catastrophic Conservative government have come to an end as Britain gave the Labour Party a general election landslide.

Exit poll predictions issued immediately after polling stations closed at 10pm put Labour on 410 seats and the Tories humbled on just 131.

This represents a gain for Labour of 209 seats over 2019, while the Tories will have lost nearly two-thirds of their parliamentary representation.

The margin of Labour victory is broadly in line with Tony Blair’s 1997 win, and not as bad for the Tories as some opinion polls had predicted in the last ten days.  Labour will have a Commons majority of around 170.

The exit poll also had the Liberal Democrats surging to 61 seats, an increase of 53, but showed Nigel Farage’s hard right Reform Party making a significant breakthrough with a predicted 13 MPs.

In Scotland, the poll had the Scottish National Party slumping to just 10 seats, a loss of 38.

Plaid Cymru will secure four MPs, and the Greens two, according to the poll.

If results correspond to the poll, which has been extremely accurate in recent elections, Keir Starmer will enter Downing Street as Prime Minister within the next 24 hours.

Firefighters’ union leader Matt Wrack said: “Today marks the end of an era of destruction and misery under Tory rule. For the past 14 years, we have endured endless attacks on our public services, pay, rights and freedoms.

“Keir Starmer has inherited a broken Britain, with millions struggling to pay the bills. To fix it, the new Labour government must turn its back on austerity and authoritarianism.

“Trade unions will be holding all new ministers to every commitment made in the New Deal for Working People. To improve people’s lives, we need to shift the balance of power away from profiteers and back to workers.

“This must start with reversing the Tories vicious anti-trade union laws.”

Labour has benefited from a riven right-wing, with a surge in support for Reform over the course of the campaign driving the Tories down to their lowest-ever share of the poll.

While final figures will only emerge over the next day, it is entirely possible that Labour has secured this Commons landslide with fewer votes than it secured in 2017, when the party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership was narrowly defeated, and possibly a smaller share of the vote too.

Constituency results will come in over the next few hours, with the great majority being declared by 7am.

Barring an unforeseen calamity, Labour will be able to govern for a full five-year parliamentary term, and its Commons majority would be difficult to entirely squander at the next election too.

Infighting within the Tories will start immediately, pitching those looking to work with Nigel Farage’s Reform on a common national-populist platform blending culture wars, migrant-baiting and neoliberal economics against more traditional “one nation” Conservatives.

The course of that struggle will be affected by which senior Tories survive what looks like a massive cull and are present in the next House of Commons to fight their corner.

The exit poll, which is based on the extrapolation of a national swing, says little about the likely result in Islington North, where Corbyn is fighting to retain his seat as an independent following his expulsion from Labour, or in other constituencies where there is a strong independent challenge to Labour.

However, none of that is going to make any significant difference to the overall outcome, which constitutes the greatest popular repudiation of the Tory Party in its history.

It comes not five years after a commanding victory under Boris Johnson, whose “get Brexit done” slogan helped the Tories win seats across industrial England and Wales, many of them for the first time in generations.

Johnson’s failure to deliver on his levelling-up promises, together with his flagrant mendacity and cronyism, started the Tory tailspin, which was compounded by the cataclysmic premiership of Liz Truss, who crashed the markets and her own leadership in just a few weeks in office in 2022.

Since then, Labour has always looked certain to win, even though Keir Starmer has shrunk his political offer on a regular basis, discarding almost all serious commitments for change.

He complicated his path to office by backing Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, alienating hundreds of thousands of voters, particularly in Muslim communities already anxious about Labour’s apparent indulgence of Islamophobia.

That all means that it looks as if Starmer will take office with a smaller vote and share of the poll than Johnson did in 2019, leaving his actual mandate rather grudging and more a testament to the perversities of the first-past-the-post system than any enthusiasm for Labour.

That will not, however, diminish the national relief to be rid of Tory government nor the hope that serious change may yet now prove possible.