Turnout: 67.30%
About this election
The general election of 12 December 2019, the first December election since 1923, delivered a decisive Conservative victory. Boris Johnson's Conservatives won 365 seats on 43.63% of the vote — a majority of 80, the party's largest since 1987 — by campaigning relentlessly on the single slogan "Get Brexit Done". Jeremy Corbyn's Labour was reduced to 202 seats, its fewest since 1935, breaking through long-held Labour strongholds in the so-called "Red Wall" of the Midlands and the North. Turnout was 67.3%.
The 650 members of the House of Commons were again elected by first-past-the-post in single-member constituencies. Johnson had to suspend the Fixed-term Parliaments Act through a special one-off bill to trigger the early election, after repeatedly failing to secure the two-thirds majority the Act otherwise required.
The 2017–2019 parliament had been consumed by Brexit. May's withdrawal agreement was rejected three times; Johnson, who replaced her in July 2019, lost his working majority, saw his attempt to prorogue parliament ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court, and was forced by MPs to seek a further extension to EU membership. With the Commons gridlocked, an election became the only way to break the impasse.
Johnson's message was disciplined and simple: a Conservative majority would pass his renegotiated Brexit deal and end three years of paralysis. Labour offered a radical programme of nationalisation and public spending and promised a second referendum, but Corbyn's personal ratings were poor and the party's Brexit stance — neutral between Leave and Remain — satisfied neither side. The Brexit Party, led by Nigel Farage, stood down candidates in Conservative-held seats to avoid splitting the Leave vote.
The defining feature of the result was the collapse of Labour's vote in post-industrial Leave-voting seats across the Midlands, the North East, the North West and Yorkshire — places such as Blyth Valley, Bolsover and Workington that had returned Labour MPs for generations. Many fell to the Conservatives for the first time, redrawing the political map and giving Johnson his majority.
The Liberal Democrats, who had hoped to capitalise on Remain sentiment, won only 11 seats and their leader Jo Swinson lost her own to the SNP. The SNP rebounded to 48 of Scotland's 59 seats on a renewed push for a second independence referendum. The Greens held their single seat, and in Northern Ireland nationalists and the cross-community Alliance gained at the expense of the unionist parties, so that for the first time more nationalist than unionist MPs were returned.
The election confirmed a realignment along the Brexit divide: the Conservatives consolidated the Leave vote and made deep inroads into the working-class north and Midlands, while Labour piled up votes in big cities and university towns without winning enough seats. The two-party share fell back as the Liberal Democrats and SNP recovered.
The map shows the Conservatives sweeping the Midlands and much of the North alongside their traditional southern base, Labour holding on in London, urban Wales and a shrunken northern core, the SNP dominant across Scotland, and the DUP still the largest party in Northern Ireland despite nationalist gains. Click any region for its full breakdown.
Labour fought the 2019 campaign under the weight of Jeremy Corbyn's poor personal ratings, a long-running and damaging controversy over antisemitism within the party, and a Brexit position — to negotiate a softer deal and then put it to a second referendum, while the leadership remained neutral — that struggled to satisfy either Leave or Remain voters. An expansive manifesto promising sweeping nationalisation, a four-day working week and free full-fibre broadband was portrayed by opponents as unaffordable, and the party found itself defending Leave-voting northern seats and Remain-voting cities with a single, ambiguous message.
Hopes that anti-Brexit voters would coalesce came to little. The Liberal Democrats' headline pledge to revoke Article 50 outright — cancelling Brexit with no further referendum — was attacked as undemocratic and overreaching, and leader Jo Swinson's ratings fell as the campaign wore on. A much-discussed "Remain alliance" of tactical voting and local stand-asides failed to deny Johnson his majority, whereas the Brexit Party's decision to withdraw candidates from Conservative-held seats helped consolidate the Leave vote behind the Conservatives — an asymmetry that proved decisive in dozens of marginal contests.
With his majority, Johnson passed the Withdrawal Agreement, and the United Kingdom formally left the European Union on 31 January 2020. Corbyn announced he would step down as Labour leader and was succeeded by Keir Starmer in April 2020. Within months the new government's agenda was overtaken by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Constituency results compiled by the House of Commons Library — commonslibrary.parliament.uk.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.