Jeremy Corbyn has announced he will quit as Labour leader after the party crashed to one of its worst ever sets of general election results.
Mr Corbyn said he ‘will not lead the party in any future election campaign’ and that he will step down once a successor has been appointed.
‘I will discuss with our party to ensure there is a process now of reflection on this result and on the policies that the party will take going forward,’ he said.
‘I will lead the party during that period to ensure that discussion takes place and we move on into the future.’
Mr Corbyn is on course to lead Labour to a tally of just 201 seats according to a bombshell forecast which has been borne out by a series of crushing defeats to the Tories in previously safe seats.
If that number is where the party finishes the election it would be even worse than Labour’s recent low watermark under Michael Foot in 1983 when it crashed to just 209 MPs.
Mr Corbyn faced immediate calls to quit from furious Labour MP candidates as soon as voting stopped at 10pm and a devastating exit poll pointed to massive losses.
His position at the top of the party was instantly untenable after he failed to win power in back-to-back elections.
His allies had tried to deflect blame away from him as they said Brexit was the cause of the party’s dismal showing.
But his party critics said the results demonstrated the ‘utter failure of Corbyn & Corbynism’ as they also hit out over his hard-left manifesto and handling of the party’s anti-Semitism crisis.
Numerous Labour big beasts had earlier put the boot in as former home secretary Alan Johnson said Mr Corbyn was ‘worse than useless’ while former shadow chancellor Ed Balls slammed the attempt to blame Brexit as he said that was ‘not going to wash at all’.
An ashen-faced John McDonnell said the predicted numbers were ‘extremely disappointing’ as he all but conceded defeat.
The shadow chancellor cited an election focus on the UK’s departure from the EU as the cause of Labour’s woes – an argument also made by shadow justice secretary Richard Burgon.
Labour is forecast to lose dozens of seats to the Conservatives with Boris Johnson predicted to win a crushing majority of 64.
The forecast puts the Tories at 357 MPs while Labour is projected to end up down 61 on the 2017 election result.
In a sign that the projection was likely to prove accurate, the Tories managed to win the former mining area of Blyth Valley for the first time ever in one of the early declarations.
Labour had held the seat since its creation in 1950 with the party having won a majority in 2017 of almost 8,000. It was ranked 85th on a list of Labour seats most vulnerable to the Tories.
But tonight the Conservatives snatched the constituency by just over 700 votes after a 10.2 per cent swing.
The Tories struck another massive blow to Labour as they gained the seat of Workington. It had been held by Labour since 1979 but the Tories managed to secure a majority of more than 4,000 votes after Conservative HQ had identified it as a crunch battleground.
Labour also lost Darlington, Peterborough, Leigh, Redcar, Burnley and Vale of Clwyd to the Conservatives.
The expected nationwide result is an emphatic rejection of Mr Corbyn’s hard-left socialist vision which he has peddled since he unexpectedly became leader in September 2015.
Labour HQ will have been devastated by the exit poll with Mr Corbyn having insisted in the days running up to yesterday that he could still spring a surprise and win a majority.
The party is now facing the prospect of a brutal leadership contest as Labour moderates and Corbyn acolytes battle for control.
Jeremy Corbyn, pictured leaving his London home just after 11pm last night, is facing intense pressure to quit with Labour on course for a disastrous set of election results
Mr Corbyn arrived at the count in his Islington North constituency at 2.20am as he faced a storm of criticism over his leadership of the party
The Labour leader appeared in good spirits as he greeted supporters at the count despite the bombshell exit poll which suggested Labour is facing a bad defeat
Mr Corbyn trailed Mr Johnson in every opinion poll leading up to the general election, with the vast majority giving the Tories a double digit lead over Labour.
Tonight’s exit poll showed that pattern had continued, with the Tories on 44 per cent, Labour on 33 per cent, the Liberal Democrats on 12 per cent, the Brexit Party on two per cent and the Green Party on three per cent.
Mr McDonnell said the predicted results were ‘extremely disappointing’ and the ‘appropriate decisions’ will be taken on the future of Mr Corbyn’s leadership once the results are fully known.
Speaking to BBC News, Mr McDonnell said: ‘I think Brexit has dominated, it has dominated everything by the looks of it.
‘We thought other issues could cut through and there would be a wider debate, from this evidence there clearly wasn’t.’
On the future of Mr Corbyn’s leadership, Mr McDonnell said: ‘Let’s see the results themselves, as I say, the appropriate decisions will be made and we’ll always make the decisions in the best interests of our party.’
Mr Burgon also blamed Brexit for the party’s poor showing as he tweeted: ‘Disappointing Exit Poll. Let’s see if accurate. If, as it seems, this was a Brexit election then the next one won’t be given Johnson’s Thatcherite agenda.
‘And Johnson must continue to be fought with radical alternatives, not triangulation, that challenge the Tories head-on.’
Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner described the exit poll as ‘incredibly devastating’ as she said that ‘we will continue to keep faith in our great movement and the UK’.
Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott said it was ‘clearly a bad night for Labour’ but she appeared to suggest she wanted Mr Corbyn to stay on as leader as she said ‘we still need a leadership that fights for the many, not the few’.
But the exit poll numbers prompted savage criticism from numerous Labour big beasts as they called for an end to Mr Corbyn’s leadership of the party.
Former Labour MP Mr Johnson who stood down in 2017 said if the exit poll is correct, the party’s losses will be purely down to Mr Corbyn’s unpopularity on the doorstep.
Speaking to ITV News, Mr Johnson said: ‘It’s Corbyn, it’s Corbyn. The Corbynistas will make an argument that victory is a bourgeois concept, that “the only goal for true socialists is glorious bloody defeat”.
‘And now we’ve just had another one. And there’ll be all the conspiracy theories thrown about. It’s Corbyn. We knew that in Parliament.
‘We knew he was incapable of leading, we knew he was worse than useless at all the qualities you need to lead a political party.’
Mr Balls told ITV he believed voters’ security fears about Mr Corbyn had also played a big role in the party’s dire performance.
Referring to the March 2018 Novichok spy poisoning, he said: ‘Salisbury was quite immediate in people’s minds and the terror attack in London.
‘This manifesto had a much bigger price tag than 2017 and I’m afraid the accumulation of nationalisation and spending commitments meant that lots of Labour voters were saying “does it add up and who is going to pay for it?”
‘It wasn’t only about Brexit. It’s a line in the Corbyn team but it’s not going to wash at all.’
Ruth Smeeth, Labour’s candidate in Stoke on Trent North, said she had ‘definitely lost’ the seat as she said Mr Corbyn was to blame.
She said that Mr Corbyn should quit immediately and that he should have resigned ‘many, many, many months ago’ because of his handling of Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis.
‘His personal actions have delivered this result,’ she said, adding that Mr Corbyn’s failure to tackle anti-Jewish racist abuse had ‘made us the nasty party’.
Dagenham East candidate Dame Margaret Hodge, a vocal critic of Mr Corbyn, echoed a similar sentiment as she tweeted: ‘If this bears out, this is the utter failure of Corbyn & Corbynism. There is no other way of looking at it.’
Labour’s Gareth Snell, who was on course to lose his Stoke Central seat, was asked on the BBC if he believed Mr Corbyn and Mr McDonnell should now quit and he replied: ‘Yes.’
Alan Johnson, pictured on ITV this morning, said Jeremy Corbyn was ‘worse than useless at all the qualities you need to lead a political party’
Tonight’s general election exit poll showed the Tories were on course to win 44 per cent of the vote with Labour far behind on 33 per cent
The Conservatives tonight managed to win the Blythe Valley seat – a former mining area – for the first time since its creation in 1950. The constituency has always been represented by the Labour Party
Shadow justice secretary Richard Burgon tried to blame Brexit for the Labour Party’s poor general election showing
Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott appeared to suggest she wanted Mr Corbyn to stay on as leader as she said ‘we still need a leadership that fights for the many, not the few’
Labour MP candidate Caroline Flint said it was a ‘terrible night’ for the party as she said Mr Corbyn and Brexit were to blame
Former Labour spin doctor for Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell said the results were ‘dreadful’ but ‘all too predictable’.
‘The country decided some time ago Jeremy Corbyn not going to be PM and Boris Johnson made a promise on Brexit which enough people were prepared to believe,’ Mr Campbell said.
‘No doubt that he has a mandate for his withdrawal agreement now. The hard stuff then starts.’
Labour peer Andrew Adonis tweeted: ‘On the doorstep in this election, the biggest issue by far was Jeremy Corbyn. Essentially the election was a referendum on Corbyn. I had more doorstep conversations about the IRA than the fate of Brexit.’
Labour MP candidate Siobhain McDonagh said the party’s underwhelming projected seat numbers were ‘one man’s fault’: ‘His campaign, his manifesto, his leadership. @jeremycorbyn.’
A Labour spokesman tried to put on a brave face on the numbers, saying in a statement: ‘We, of course, knew this was going to be a challenging election, with Brexit at the forefront of many people’s minds and our country increasingly polarised.
‘But Labour has changed the debate in British politics. We have put public ownership, a green industrial revolution, an end to austerity centre stage and introduced new ideas, such as plans for free broadband and free personal care. The Tories only offered more of the same.’
A leaked copy of Labour’s so-called ‘lines to take’ document – prompts given to senior figures ahead of appearances on TV – sparked fury among many of the party’s candidates because they suggested people should solely blame Brexit.
The document said ‘this defeat is overwhelmingly down to one issue – the divisions in the country over Brexit, and the Tory campaign, echoed by most of the media, to persuade people that only Boris Johnson can “get Brexit done”‘.
Ben Bradshaw, Labour’s candidate in Exeter, said that analysis of the result was ‘rubbish, as anyone who knocked on any doors in this campaign will tell you’.
‘We knocked on more than 20,000 doors in Exeter in six weeks and would be happy to share our data with whoever wrote this briefing,’ he tweeted.
Numerous Labour MP candidates put the boot into Mr Corbyn after the exit poll was published. Ian Murray, who is contesting Edinburgh South, said the Labour leader was a problem on the doorstep
Jess Phillips, Labour’s candidate in Birmingham Yardley, described the poll numbers as a ‘punch in the stomach’
Labour grandee Lord Falconer said last week that Mr Corbyn should resign and be replaced ‘as quickly as we reasonably can’ if he loses to Mr Johnson.
But one of Mr Corbyn’s staunchest allies, the founder of the Momentum campaign group Jon Lansman, said this morning that a decision on whether the leader should be replaced doesn’t need to be taken ‘until the New Year’.
On whether Mr Corbyn should quit, Mr Lansman: ‘I think Jeremy has to make those decisions himself. You know Jeremy has always been a reluctant leader, I don’t think he’ll overstay his welcome.’
‘But I think he should be able to make decisions. And I don’t think we should rush into these things. Christmas is not far away, I don’t think decisions really need to be taken about this until the New Year.’
A number of female MPs have been mentioned as possible successors to Mr Corbyn, including Ms Rayner, Jess Phillips and Rebecca Long-Bailey.
Labour’s shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry and North West Durham candidate Laura Pidcock could also figure in a leadership race.
Shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer is also likely to be in the race.
Elected leader in 2015 with little support from his own MPs, Mr Corbyn has faced repeated plots to remove him since then.
He confounded those critics with an unexpectedly strong performance in the 2017 election, gaining seats and denying Theresa May a majority.
But since then his party has been engulfed in an anti-Semitism crisis and Mr Corbyn has been widely criticised for his handling of it.
During the campaign, he failed to apologise to Jewish people in a stormy interview with Andrew Neil.
In addition, Mr Corbyn’s equivocal stance on Brexit has infuriated many Remainers who wanted him to support cancelling Brexit.
Under pressure from party activists, Mr Corbyn finally agreed to back a second referendum.
However, he drew fresh criticism for pledging to be ‘neutral’ during a second referendum campaign.
Opening the door to cancelling Brexit may also have cost Labour votes in some of its heartlands where it is set to lose seats.