General election 2024: UK awaits exit poll as millions cast votes across country – latest live news

Good evening. Britain’s first past the post (FPTP) electoral system is flawed in many respects – it is not fair to small parties, it means many people feel that their votes never count, it does not guarantee stable governments – but in one respect at least it performs brilliantly. When the nation is truly fed up with a government, and when the public is determined to “throw the rascals out”, FPTP delivers. As in 1906, or 1945, or 1997, it can lead to an unpopular governing party being crushed by a landslide that reshapes the political landscape. We’re expecting another tonight.

There is no particular mystery about why the Conservative party is on course to lose so badly. Last month Cambrige University Press published a new book about the record of the party in government over the past 14 years. It concluded that, measured by its performance, this has been the worst government in postwar history. Nobody has seriously tried to argue that this assessment is wrong.

And there does not seem to be anyone in the political world who is not expecting a Labour landslide victory tonight. Election nights often produce surprises, but they came in two categories. Some elections produce an unexpected shock (like John Major winning in 1992, or David Cameron getting an outright majority in 2015, or Theresa May throwing it away in 2017.) But there are also elections that produce an expected shock; a result that that is in line with what pollsters were predicting, but yet is still a surprise because the numbers seemed too outlandish to be true. This happened in 1997, when hardly anyone believed regular polls suggesting Tony Blair was on course for a majority heading for the 200 mark (including the papers that paid for them). And it seems likely to happen again tonight.

But there is still huge uncertainty as to how well Labour might do. The Elections Etc website has published a round-up of the different results forecast by different methods (simple modelling, based on opinion polls; more complex modelling based on the same polls; MRP polls; and the betting markets). On average these models are predicting a Labour majority of 194. The lowest projected figure for the Labour majority (from simple model forecasting) is 88.

But pollsters regard their MRP surveys as particularly reliable, and the numbers these polls are producing are astonishing. Here is the summary from Elections Etc.

Some of these predictions are certain to be very badly wrong. (There is a big difference between Labour getting a majority of 210 and 382.) Perhaps the MRP pollsters have all got it wrong? But, as we go into election night, they have created an extraordinary situation where Keir Starmer could end up with a majority of 100, which would still be a landslide, or even 150 – an astonishing result for a party that lost very badly less than five years ago – and still feel a tad disappointed.

Anyway, we will have a much better idea at 10pm, when the results of the exit poll are out. For the last 20 years it has mostly been very reliable. And by tomorrow we will know for sure. Unless election 2024 has produced the greatest failure since people started trying to measure electoral opinion in the democratic age, Keir Starmer will become prime minister (around lunchtime?) and he will start forming a new government.

Here is an hour-by-hour guide to what results we are expecting an when.

And here is a guide from Rob Ford, a psephologist, to the trends we should be looking out for.

I’m Andrew Sparrow and I’ll be blogging through the night with Léonie Chao-Fong. We will be covering results here, but we also have a seperate results page here. And of course we will be bringing you reaction and analsyis into the night and all through Friday. I am unlikely to have much time to look at the comments tonight but if you want to flag something up to me, try using X; I’ll see something addressed to @AndrewSparrow very quickly.