On 4 July 2024, voters across the United Kingdom delivered the largest electoral defeat in the modern history of the Conservative Party. Labour, led by Keir Starmer, won more than 400 seats in the House of Commons, while the Conservatives fell to fewer than 125, their worst result in over a century, and Rishi Sunak stepped down as prime minister.
Starmer, a former chief prosecutor, took office on a deliberately modest platform: stability, growth, planning reform and the repair of public services, above all the health service. He promised competence over charisma, an explicit rejection of the radical style of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn and of the economic turbulence of the Liz Truss era that had so badly dented Tory credibility.
The scale of the Labour majority masked two uncomfortable facts that would define the new government: it won with barely a third of the vote as support fragmented across smaller parties, and it inherited what ministers immediately called a country in severe economic repair. The result ended a chapter of British politics while leaving the country’s deeper questions, about devolution, immigration and the economy, largely unanswered.