After traditional Labour strongholds flipped to the Conservatives, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the results gave his government “a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done.”
Charles Michel, president of the European Council, congratulated Mr. Johnson and said he expected Parliament to vote on the Brexit withdrawal agreement “as soon as possible.”
Conservatives celebrate their biggest win since Margaret Thatcher.
With all but one district declared on Friday morning, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservatives had won 364 seats — 47 more than they won in the last election, in 2017.
The victory is the party’s biggest since Margaret Thatcher captured a third term in 1987 — “literally before many of you were born,” Mr. Johnson told supporters Friday morning. It gives him a comfortable majority in the 650-seat House of Commons.
“We did it,” he said. “We smashed it, didn’t we?”
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party had to reach even farther back to find a more extreme result. It won 203 seats, down 59 from the previous vote, in its worst showing since 1935. It had not suffered a similar drubbing since 1983, when it took 209 seats.
The Scottish National Party captured 48 of Scotland’s 59 seats, a gain of 13. The Liberal Democrats, who were hoping to ride an anti-Brexit stance back to prominence, won just 11 seats, one fewer than in 2017.
The Conservatives collected 43.6 percent of the popular vote, to 32.3 percent for Labour. That 11.3 percentage point margin was also the largest for the Tories since 1987 — a dramatic shift from 2017, when Labour lost the popular vote by just 2.4 percent.U.K. Election Results: How Conservatives Won in a LandslidePrime Minister Boris Johnson secured a large majority in Parliament. Here’s how he did it.
Boris Johnson promises Brexit, and a life after it.
Speaking to his constituents in Uxbridge early Friday morning, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the election results appeared to have given his government “a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done.”
Later in the morning, he told supporters, “we put an end to all those miserable threats of a second referendum” that might have reversed the results of the 2016 vote on Brexit.
“We will get Brexit done on time on the 31st of January — no ifs, no buts, no maybes,” he added.
He also promised that his government would spend more at home after a decade of austerity under Conservative governments — in particular on Britain’s National Health Service, known commonly as the N.H.S., a cherished program whose conditions have deteriorated.
Mr. Johnson said that he would seek “to unite this country and to take it forward and to focus on the priorities of the British people, and above all on the N.H.S.”
As hospital beds have overflowed, waiting times have gone up and vacancies have gone unfilled, many Britons have grown fearful that the health service could be privatized or otherwise overhauled — for instance by a trade deal with the United States that could drive up drug prices. (President Trump, tweeting congratulations on Friday morning, said Britain could “strike a massive new Trade Deal” after Brexit.)
Mr. Johnson insisted he would protect the health service, echoing his campaign promises to hire 50,000 more nurses and 6,000 doctors.
He promised again to hire more police officers, whose ranks have also thinned, and vowed “colossal new investments in infrastructure and science.”
