‘Change begins now’, says Sir Keir Starmer in first speech after winning general election

Sir Keir Starmer has said that Britain can look forward to “sunlight of hope” after Labour won by a landslide.

The party has now officially secured victory at the general election, having secured more than the 326 seats needed for a majority in the Commons.

The Labour leader declared that “change begins now” as he gave his first speech after winning the general election.

Speaking at the Tate Modern Gallery in central London, the next prime minister said: “Across our country people will be waking up to the news, relieved that a weight has been lifted, a burden finally removed from the shoulders of this great nation.

“And now we can look forward again, walk into the morning, the sunlight of hope, pale at first but getting stronger through the day, shining once again on a country with the opportunity after 14 years to get its future back.”

Sir Keir appeared to echo the words of Sir Tony Blair when he won his 1997 landslide and declared: “A new dawn is breaking, isn’t it wonderful?”

The Labour leader spoke an hour after he received the call from Rishi Sunak, who told him that he was conceding defeat.

It is understood that Sir Keir was in the car with his wife, travelling from his constituency count in Holborn & St Pancras to the speech at the Tate Modern, when he took the call.

Arriving at the stage behind a lectern with the new slogan “Change Begins”, he said: “You campaigned for it, you fought for it, you voted for it and now it is arrived.

“Change begins now. And it feels good, I have to be honest”.

But he issued a word of warning: “I don’t promise you it will be easy. Changing a country is not like flicking a switch. It’s hard work. Patient work. Determined work”

He added: “But even when the going gets tough, and it will, remember, tonight and always, what this is all about”.

Sir Keir emphasised that Labour would mean “change” and concluded: “We said we would end the chaos and we will. We said we would turn the page and we have.

“Today we start the next chapter. Begin the work of change, the mission of national renewal and start to rebuild our country.”

He smiled broadly as he left the stage, going to embrace his wife Victoria.

Sir Keir went on to greet Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, and Lord Kinnock, the former Labour leader.

His comments came after exit polls showed Labour was on track to secure the biggest swing from one party to another in modern history with the party’s victory described as an “electoral meteor” hitting Britain.

The results suggested that Labour could become the biggest party in England, Scotland and Wales for the first time in 23 years.

The 170-seat majority predicted in exit polls, with 410 Labour seats, is uncannily similar to the numbers achieved by Sir Tony in his historic 1997 landslide. But where Sir Tony managed a 10.2 percentage point swing in 1997 – the biggest since the war at the time – Sir Keir was on course to smash that mark on Thursday night.

Lord Mandelson, who helped mastermind Sir Tony’s three general election wins, said he was “gobsmacked” by the exit poll as he told the BBC: “An electoral meteor has now struck planet Earth.”

He added: “In a sense, it’s not surprising given everything the country has gone through over the past 10 years. I think it would have required Superman as leader of the Conservative Party to lead them back to some sort of victory, and Mr Sunak is not Superman.”

Ironically, the peculiarities of electoral maths mean that Sir Keir’s victory might have been achieved with a lower overall vote share than Jeremy Corbyn managed in 2019, in what has been described as a “loveless landslide”.

Electoral Calculus estimates published by GB News suggested Labour had secured 36.1 per cent of the national vote share, with the Tories on 25.8 per cent, Reform on 17.2 per cent and the Lib Dems on 9.4 per cent. Mr Corbyn managed a 40 per cent vote share in 2019.

Rory Stewart, a former Tory Cabinet minister, told Channel 4: “Labour may well have got a staggering majority with quite a low percentage of the vote.

“Reform may have ended up with quite a high percentage of the vote and a low number of seats. The Lib Dems might have got fewer votes and five times the number of seats.”

When the result was described on the programme as a “loveless landslide” he said: “I think it’s a big problem – 36 per cent of the vote in historical terms has been nothing.

“Nobody has won anything like this in history with 36 per cent of the vote. This is barely more than a third of the population voting for you.”

What matters, though, is vote share in individual seats, and Labour appeared to have pulled off the all-important trick of making sure they had enough votes in enough seats to win them, whereas Reform, with almost twice as big a share of the vote as the Lib Dems, was predicted to win fewer than a quarter as many seats as Sir Ed Davey’s party.

Sir Keir wrote on Twitter: “To everyone who has campaigned for Labour in this election, to everyone who voted for us and put their trust in our changed Labour Party – thank you.”

Sir Keir’s predicted 410 MPs would compare with 418 Labour MPs in 1997 and 412 in 2001, while a 170-seat majority would be just nine short of the 179 managed by Sir Tony in 1997.

Labour needed a bigger swing than that achieved by Sir Tony in 1997 just to achieve a single-seat majority – a change that many had predicted could not be achieved in a single leap when Boris Johnson secured his 80-seat majority in 2019. Five years after its worst defeat in almost a century, Labour is celebrating what appears to be its second-biggest majority in history, while it is the Tories who are stunned by their worst result in centuries.

Lord Mandelson said: “Nobody in 2019, nobody would have imagined this was possible.” Even more recently, in 2021, Labour was defeated in the Hartlepool by-election, leaving Sir Keir contemplating resigning as he doubted he was the right person to take the party forward. At that point, only three years ago, some commentators pondered if Labour was finished as a party capable of being elected to govern, while others suggested it would take a decade to get back to a position where they could compete in general elections.

Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said of the NHS: “The scale of the challenge is daunting.”

Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, hinted at Labour’s grim economic inheritance and said there would be “hard choices” ahead.

Mood of expulsion

Lord Kinnock, the former Labour leader, told the BBC that voters turning out for Labour have been captivated by a “mood of expulsion at the sheer decadence of the Conservative government” and “a revulsion against the incompetence and the multiple crises”.

Some Tory big beasts were toppled by Labour, including Sir Robert Buckland, the former justice secretary, who was ousted by Heidi Alexander in Swindon South.

In her victory speech, Ms Alexander said that people had “voted for change” and a Labour government would “change our country for the better”.

However, jubilation at Labour’s predicted landslide has been tarnished by a number of key losses, including Islington North, where former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn beat his old party to be elected as an independent.

Elsewhere, two shadow cabinet members lost their seats in shock defeats.

Shadow paymaster general Jonathan Ashworth’s share of the vote collapsed by more than a third as he lost to Shockat Adam, a pro-Palestine independent candidate, in Leicester South.

Meanwhile, Thangam Debbonaire, the shadow culture secretary, lost out to the Green Party’s Carla Denyer in Bristol Central.

Despite winning in his north London constituency, Sir Keir’s majority was diminished to 11,572, down from 22,766 in 2019.