Labour Won a U.K. Landslide. Why Doesn’t It Feel Like That?

Britain’s voters handed the Labour Party a landslide election victory this week, but one laden with asterisks.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer took office on Friday with a commanding majority in the British Parliament, yet in terms of the total number of ballots cast, his party won only a third of the vote, less than what it got in 2017 when it lost to the Conservatives. Labour made inroads across Britain, yet its wins were often eclipsed by the Tory losses, including that of Liz Truss, the unpopular former prime minister who was evicted from her seat.

The thundering mutiny of the voters may have been the single biggest message of Britain’s election. It has ushered in a new era of Labour government, left the Conservatives to nurse the worst defeat in their history, and stands as a warning to incumbents everywhere of the hazards of failing to deliver on your promises.

But Labour’s triumph was only one of several crosscurrents that revealed the extraordinary volatility of the modern British electorate: the rise of Reform U.K., an insurgent anti-immigration party, which won more than four million votes; the plummeting vote share of the major parties; the lowest voter turnout in decades, and the flare-up of the Gaza War as a campaign issue that stung Labour candidates, even Mr. Starmer.

While he comfortably held his own seat in London, Mr. Starmer won 17,000 fewer votes than in 2019, thanks in part to a challenge by an independent who channeled anger on the left over Labour’s stance on Israel and the war in Gaza.

It all added up to a complex election that defies easy categorization: a landslide, but not a straightforward realignment of the political map; a pivot to the center-left, but one that gave the populist right a valuable foothold; a thumping Labour win, but without the euphoria that suffused Tony Blair’s runaway victory in 1997. “A loveless landslide,” one commentator said on Friday morning.