The New Yorker:

By the time that Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, arrived at the vote count in his Islington North constituency, in the small hours of Friday morning, it was clear that something historic had taken place in British politics. Thursday’s snap general election, which Theresa May, the Conservative Prime Minister, had called to bolster her party’s slim minority in the House of Commons, had turned into something of a calamity for her party and a humiliation for her personally. The outcome was also a stunning vindication for Corbyn, who had defied the predictions—some of them offered by his own colleagues at Westminster—that he would lead the Labour Party to a crushing defeat.

On Thursday, after the polls closed at 10 P.M., a network exit poll projected that the Conservative Party, far from improving its position in the Commons, would fail to gain an over-all majority–an outcome that virtually nobody predicted a month ago. As the results filtered in from around the country, they confirmed the exit-poll projection. On Friday, with all but one of the six hundred and fifty seats in the House of Commons accounted for, the Conservatives were projected to win three hundred and eighteen seats—thirteen fewer than the Party won in the 2015 general election, and eight votes shy of a majority. Labour won two hundred and sixty-one votes, a gain of twenty-nine. Later on Friday, May said that she would form a new government with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, which won ten seats. But there was a lot of speculation about a possible leadership challenge to her in the Conservative Party, and even talk of another election sometime soon.

Corbyn kept his own seat, which he has held since 1983, by a record majority—a fact he pointed out in his acceptance speech. He also thanked the police for the work they have done over the past couple of weeks, which have seen two deadly terrorist attacks, in Manchester and London. Then he gave his owns analysis of the election outcome. “You know what?” he said. “Politics has changed, and politics isn’t going back into the box where it was before.”...

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