Election 2024 in numbers: Labour seats and Tory defeat

If your brain is feeling scrambled from staying up all night to follow the election results, this might help you process what just happened in the UK.

We’ve broken down the night into the numbers you need to know as the country goes into a new period of leadership under Keir Starmer and the Labour Party.

412

That’s the number of seats the Labour Party have won in 2024 so far, claiming an enormous majority of 170. They now become the government for the next five years.

Jon Sopel called the numbers "astonishing".

"From where they were in 2019 to this today seems frankly unimaginable. If you want to talk the language of geology this is an earthquake, a tsunami, tectonic plates are shifting", he said.

60

This is the percentage of people who visited a polling station to cast their vote last night. However, this is a drop from the 67.3% turnout in 2019, showing "voter apathy" in the UK.

Lewis Goodall says we have seen "the idea of voter apathy, the idea of voter confusion, a sense perhaps that none of the big parties appealed in particular."

250

That’s how many seats the Conservative Party have lost so far this election. In the 2019 election, the Tories won over Labour with a majority of 162. It is the worst election result in their history, which began in 1834.

4

Amid the headlines, the controversy and the TV appearances Nigel Farage has made, Reform UK have claimed four seats. Farage now becomes an MP for the first time, having failed in his previous seven attempts.

But Emily Maitlis notes: ”For every seat that they did get, there are others they didn't get, where their share of the vote is still phenomenal, sometimes on over 30%.”

Four is also the number of seats won by the Green Party, which managed to quadruple the number of MPs it has sitting in Parliament.

71

The Lib Dems have cause for celebration, as this is the number of seats they’ve won in the election. It bumps them up from the 11 they claimed in 2019.

11

That's how many top ministers lost their seats. From Grant Shapps and Gillian Keegan, it was certainly a bleak night for some of the big names in the Tory Party.

6

The number of Independent MPs who won a seat. Jeremy Corbyn managed to secure his Islington North, with 24,120. But it wasn't a great night for all independent candidates, with George Galloway losing the Rochdale seat to Labour's Paul Waugh.

Maitlis says: "There are people you speak to on the doorstep who say they hate the government of the day, but don't really know who to vote for.

"Now, if an independent comes along and says those immortal words, they're all the same, vote for me, maybe you go with it.”

In today's episode of The News Agents, Emily, Jon and Lewis look back at everything that happened in the 2024 General Election. Listen now.