David Cameron and Conservatives Get Majority in British Election

The vote was a stunning disappointment for the opposition Labour Party and its leader, Ed Miliband, who had shifted the party away from the more centrist strategy it pursued in the late 1990s and early 2000s under Tony Blair. Miliband stepped down on Friday, opening up a new debate over the party’s direction.

The result defied pre-election opinion polls that suggested a tight race between the Conservatives and Labour. It returns Cameron to 10 Downing Street for a second term, with enough seats in the House of Commons to act on his agenda without having to rely on support from smaller parties.

He went to Buckingham Palace on Friday to be invited by the queen to form a new government.

Labour was nearly wiped out in Scotland by the surging Scottish National Party and did more poorly than pre-election opinion polls had suggested it would in the rest of Britain. Several of Miliband’s top lieutenants lost their seats.

“Now the results are still coming in, but this has clearly been a very disappointing and difficult night for the Labour Party,” Miliband said in a quasi concession speech after being re-elected to his seat in the House of Commons.

“We haven’t made the gains that we wanted in England and Wales,” he said, “and in Scotland we have seen a surge of nationalism overwhelm our party.”

The results were also a disaster for Nick Clegg and his centrist Liberal Democrats, who have been the junior partner in a coalition with the Conservatives. Clegg hung on to his seat in the House of Commons, but he resigned as party leader after results that exceeded the party’s very worst expectations.

“It is now painfully clear that this has been a cruel and punishing night for the Liberal Democrats,” said Clegg, who had served as deputy prime minister in the departing coalition government under Cameron.

Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist, anti-immigration, anti-European Union U.K. Independence Party, lost his bid for a seat in Parliament, and his party appeared to have won only a single seat. Farage on Friday followed through on his promise to step down as the party’s leader if he failed to win his race, a step that will deprive it of much of its visibility and volume.

By early afternoon in London, the Conservatives had won 326 of 650 seats in the House of Commons, and the BBC was projecting that the party’s total would rise to 331 by the time all the votes are counted. Should the Conservatives reach that figure, it would be a gain of 24 seats from the last election, in 2010.

The result was something of a shock to a nation that had been conditioned by months of polls suggesting a near tie between the Conservatives and Labour to expect days or weeks of negotiations following Election Day, in which the two parties would have to cobble together a viable coalition.

Asked on Friday why he thought the nation had returned the Conservatives to power, one Londoner, Peter Hamlin, 62, replied, “I think the general feeling is that maybe they had a hard job to do, and they kind of did it OK, and maybe it is time to give them a shot, and maybe a shot on their own without liberals getting in the way of their policies.”

There was discouragement among Labour supporters. “I was really disappointed,” said Tom Sears, 32, who works at the London Zoo. “People like myself won’t suffer, but I worry about people who suffer cuts.”

Speaking in his electoral district after his re-election, Cameron said it was “clearly a very strong night for the Conservative Party.”

With nearly all the constituencies reporting, Labour had won 230 seats and was projected by the BBC to end up with 232 seats, a decline of 26 from the 2010 results. In another humiliating blow for Labour, Ed Balls, who speaks for the party on economic issues and is one of its most influential figures, lost his seat of Morley and Outwood to the Conservatives.

“Any personal disappointment I have at this result is as nothing as compared to the sense of sorrow I have at the result that Labour has achieved across the United Kingdom,” Balls said after the result was announced.

The Scottish National Party won 56 of 59 seats in Scotland, rolling over Labour. In 2010, the Scottish nationalists won only six seats.

Nicola Sturgeon, the party’s leader, said Friday that the “tectonic plates in Scottish politics have shifted.”