LONDON — A triumphant U.K. Labour Party is headed back to power in Britain after winning a historic landslide election victory over the ruling Conservatives.

In the early hours of Friday morning Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak conceded his party had lost the snap election he called six weeks ago and said Labour would form the next government.

The scale of the result is extraordinary, with Labour on course for a 170-seat majority in the House of Commons — the biggest since Tony Blair’s famous win in 1997.

It means Britain’s new PM will be 61-year-old human rights lawyer Keir Starmer, who has transformed his party’s fortunes after 14 years in the political wilderness. He will be appointed prime minister by King Charles at Buckingham Palace on Friday.

“We did it!” a beaming Starmer declared at a raucous victory rally in London in the early hours of the morning.

“Across the country people will be waking up to the news relieved that a burden has been lifted, a weight lifted from the shoulders of this great nation. The sunshine of hope is returning to our great country.”

For the Tories, the result — though widely predicted — is crushing, a disastrous end to PM Rishi Sunak’s audacious snap election gambit.

Forecasts based on the official exit poll and early results predicted the Tories will collapse to just 144 MPs — the lowest total in the party’s illustrious history, beating its previous nadir of 156 back in 1906.

Outgoing PM Sunak called Starmer in the early hours of the morning to finally concede defeat.

“The Labour Party has won this election,” Sunak said. “The British people have delivered a sobering verdict and I take responsibility for the loss.”

A Labour victory in the U.K. bucks the trend of center-left decline in many prosperous Western economies. Growing numbers of voters in countries including France, Italy and Germany have embraced the far-right at recent elections.

In France, the party of Marine Le Pen is one step away from taking power in parliamentary elections for the first time in the republic’s modern history in a vote this Sunday.

That trend was on show in the U.K., too, albeit not to the same extent as elsewhere.

Right-wing populist Nigel Farage won a seat in the House of Commons at the eighth attempt, with his upstart Reform party projected to win millions of votes.

The first high profile Cabinet casualty of the night was Grant Shapps, the defense secretary, who lost his seat just after 3 a.m.

Such numbers would make Starmer the U.K.’s most powerful leader since Blair, with complete command of parliament and a second term beckoning in five years’ time.

Over the course of the six-week campaign, Starmer urged voters to give him their backing and “turn the page” on years of scandal, division and economic turmoil under former PMs Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

Starmer was criticised for his pedestrian debating style and for giving few details of his plans for power. But none of those things seemed to matter: Just not being a Tory seemed to be enough for many voters, with pollsters identifying a widespread public mood for change.

Farage triumphs

In his acceptance speech, Farage hailed a “truly extraordinary” result and vowed to “build a mass national movement over the next few years” to challenge Labour for power at the next election, expected in 2029.

“Something very fundamental is happening,” Farage declared. “There is a massive gap in the center-right of British politics and my job is to fill it.” He added: “This is just the first step of something that is going to stun all of you.”

Elsewhere, the forecast indicated a long-awaited revival for the centrist Liberal Democrats, who would be restored as Britain’s third-largest party with 56 seats after almost a decade of obscurity.

But there was bleak news for the once-mighty Scottish National Party. In 2019, the pro-Scottish independence SNP won 48 of Scotland’s 57 Westminster seats.

But the forecast saw the SNP slumping to just 6 MPs, a disaster for a party which has dominated Scottish politics since 2015 — but has faced a series of scandals and declining popularity in recent years.

Speaking on ITV, the former Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she feared a poor night for her party. “There will be a lot of questions that need to be asked,” she said.

Delight and relief for Labour

In private Labour Party officials struggled to contain their glee, having witnessed their party suffer four miserable election defeats at the hands of the Tories since 2010.

“We are looking slightly incredulously at the SNP and Reform numbers,” said one. “But [we are] delighted and relieved. You don’t know paranoia like Labour members.”

Within Tory circles the blame game was already underway, with key figures blaming global crises like Covid-19 as well as Sunak and his ill-fated campaign.

“We’ve not really given enough thought to what the electorate wants,” one minister said. “Some of it is our own mismanagement.”

Others were far less charitable, pointing the finger squarely at key Sunak aides like Party Chair Richard Holden and Deputy PM Oliver Dowden.

“No two ways about it, it’s a catastrophic comedown even from the turn of the year,” a second Tory minister said. “Holden, Dowden and other over-promoted ex-[advisers] who steered us at full tilt into this iceberg should be exiled to Ascension … or somewhere a little more remote.”

Asked about his party’s future, Tory minister Steve Baker — also expected to lose his seat — said there will “undoubtedly be recriminations, there will be shock, there will be anger, there will be denial.

But some Tories were simply relieved the result was not even worse. Some pre-election polls suggested the party could effectively be wiped from the electoral map. “I had feared worse,” a third Tory minister admitted.

“It’s a disaster for the Tories — but it’s not the complete catastrophe that some were predicting,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, and author of “The Conservative Party after Brexit.”

“They will be spooked, though, by what looks like a strong showing from Reform. The question is: Will that see them swing even further to the populist right than they have already?”

The night was not without its reversals for Labour, amid some unexpected results across the U.K.

One of Starmer’s top lieutenants — the Shadow Paymaster General Jonathan Ashworth — lost his seat to an independent running on a pro-Gaza ticket, in a major shock for Labour.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn — running as an independent after he was kicked out of Labour — also successfully defended his Islington North seat in the face of a Labour challenge.

This developing story is being updated. Dan Bloom, Sam Blewett, Stefan Boscia, Emilio Casalicchio and Tim Ross provided additional reporting.