A mild-mannered man, courteous to the end towards the Labour MP who had taken his seat in Swindon South, Sir Robert Buckland simply could no longer hold in his anger.
He was fed up of the political “jockeying” and those colleagues in his party who said things they “know to be untrue”.
At a little after midnight, Buckland, a former justice secretary, had been the first Conservative MP to lose his seat in the Labour landslide – and he was spitting.
The former home secretary Suella Braverman had shown “astonishing indiscipline” in criticising Rishi Sunak on the eve of the poll, he said.
The party would fall into the abyss if it elevated such characters to its leadership.
Did those squabbling now over Sunak’s job not see that it was a case of “bald men arguing over a comb”?
It was the first scream of frustration from a pack of Conservative party leading lights swallowed up in the cratering of the Tory vote across the country.
Labour was set to do better than the 145-seat majority enjoyed by Clement Attlee in 1945 or the 144 seats that secured a second term in office for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in 1983.
It was devastating – an electoral “armageddon” Buckland conceded – but the Labour party’s officer class were on strict orders to stifle their understandable delight in the early hours.
Angela Rayner, seemingly destined to be deputy prime minister, barely offered a smile when she was asked to respond to the exit poll forecast of a Labour majority of 170.
“We understand the weight on our shoulders … and I would say to the people of this country, ‘I will always put you first, and I will fight really hard every day to turn things around,’” she said.
Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, who was the first to hold her seat, in Houghton and Sunderland South, was careful in her choice of words.
“Tonight the British people have spoken, and if the exit poll this evening is again a guide to results across our country – as it so often is – then after 14 years, the British people have chosen change,” she said. “They have chosen Labour and they have chosen the leadership of Keir Starmer. Today our country, with its proud history, has chosen a brighter future.”
Peter Mandelson, a key architect of Blair’s historic victory nearly three decades ago, was less reserved. “An electoral meteor has now struck planet earth,” he said.
The exit poll, which has not been significantly wrong since 1992, when it falsely pointed to a hung parliament rather than a majority for John Major, had suggested that Labour had won an estimated 410 seats in the 650-seat parliament, and a majority just nine short of the 179 won in 1997.
Watching the television in his constituency home in Richmond, North Yorkshire, Rishi Sunak learned that the Conservatives looked set to win just 131 seats, making it the party’s worst electoral performance since 1832.
Sunak tweeted: “To the hundreds of Conservative candidates, thousands of volunteers and millions of voters: Thank you for your hard work, thank you for your support, and thank you for your vote.”
As the hours passed, any doubts about the exit poll’s accuracy dissipated. The Conservative MP Steve Baker, an avid Brexiter, was told he had a 1% chance of keeping his seat in Wycombe. “I will be swept away in a few hours and many of your viewers will be cheering,” he conceded.
A host of other leading Tories, including the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, and the leader of the house, Penny Mordaunt, were also said to be in peril from a historic electoral drubbing.
It was all the more painful, perhaps, as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK appeared to have made an extraordinary breakthrough, potentially gaining what his deputy leader, Ben Habib, described as a “bridgehead” in parliament, winning as many as 13 seats.
after newsletter promotion
Farage looked set to win a seat, Clacton, at the eighth time of asking, as did Richard Tice, Reform’s chair, in Boston and Skegness. “This is politically seismic,” Habib said.
Prof Sir John Curtice, the psephologist who led the team that produced the exit poll, initially suggested that his team was least confident about the seat figures for Reform UK and for the SNP in Scotland, which was said to be on track for just 10 seats, damaging its claims of a “mandate for independence”.
But there were signs within the first results that Reform had picked up votes from Labour and the Conservatives, coming second in a host of seats, including Blyth and Ashington where it took 10,857 votes, as Labour secured 20,030 votes and the Tories came third with 6,121.
“This, folks, is huge,” Farage said, noting that there were two results in the north-east of England that put Reform on 30% of the vote. “It is almost unbelievable,” he said.
The rise of Reform UK and a seemingly low turnout will be cause for concern in years to come for those in the centre ground of British politics, but the Liberal Democrat leader, Ed Davey, was unable to contain his glee as the exit poll suggested he would be leading a party with 61 seats rather than the 11 won in 2019.
He said: “The Liberal Democrats are on course for our best results in a century, thanks to our positive campaign with health and care at its heart. I am humbled by the millions of people who backed us to both kick the Conservatives out of power and deliver the change our country needs.”
Plaid Cymru in Wales was set to win four seats, while the Greens were on course to win two, after taking a single seat in 2019.
For the Conservatives, the former leader William Hague, a close friend of Sunak, who inherited his constituency seat, struggled to find anything to cheer. The party would “just about” be able to mount an effective opposition, he said.
“The answer will be to build again for the future,” he said. “The Conservative party at its greatest – as it has been over 200 years – is usually the governing party of the country because it could command the centre ground of politics, people of all walks of life, people of all age groups, and it will have to be able to do that. It will take a long time to be able to do that, but it will have to be able to do that.”
Across the country, the Conservative vote appeared to have collapsed. Down 24% in the north of England, where Boris Johnson made hay in 2019, down 29% in the Midlands, down 23% in the south, down 16% in London.
Along with Hunt, who could be the first chancellor to ever lose his seat, the exit poll suggested those in danger included Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, and Johnny Mercer, the veterans minister. The seats of the transport secretary, Mark Harper, the work and pensions secretary, Mel Stride, and the environment secretary, Steve Barclay, were all “too close to call”.
“There is no dressing it up,” said the former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson. “This is a massacre.”
