General election 2010: How Britain voted

The only pattern was that there was no pattern: Scotland swung to Labour, England to the Tories, and everywhere the exceptions ruled. The election of Britain's first Green MP, Caroline Lucas, in Brighton, and the Alliance party's remarkable win in Belfast East, flashed by all but unremarked. This was a night for extraordinary outcomes. Labour won Rochdale on a positive swing from the Lib Dems, the town where a week ago the prime minister seemed to have destroyed his chances by insulting a Labour voter. Nationally, the Labour vote was only a touch over the party's 1983 performance, but it felt better than that, while the Conservatives' 36% seemed painfully low, even though it was more than Tony Blair managed in 2005. And the biggest Liberal Democrat vote since the party's formation was, in the circumstances, a disaster. So many things were strange. Turnout was up a bit on 2005, but well below the hoped for 70%. Those missing voters might explain why the Lib Dems underperformed. Yet in some places, in, for instance, Warwick and Leamington which showed 84.5%, it was extraordinarily high, and the night had voters complaining of being turned away from polling stations due to queues. At the far end of the Tory target list, Waveney went blue; this was the Suffolk seat that on a uniform swing would have made Cameron a majority prime minister. At the other end of the list, the Tories stormed Gillingham and Rainham in Kent, winning with a 9.3% swing. Much more like that and Cameron would already be asking his friends to Chequers this weekend. Instead there was Birmingham Edgbaston: a totemic Labour gain in 1997, it had been all but written off as a Labour possibility. But when the votes were counted, Labour held on with a swing of just 0.5% to the Conservatives. Labour's hold in Dumfries and Galloway was less of a surprise, though parts of the seat went Tory as recently as 2001. But Labour's Clive Efford defied the national swing of about 5% to hold on to Eltham, in south-east London, quite comfortably. London was an unexpected source of Tory gloom: the city that elected Boris Johnson as mayor proved less enamoured of David Cameron. Boris's brother Jo Johnson – the ambitious one in the family, some say – scored an easy win in Orpington. On a 12.2% anti-Lib Dem swing, he replaced the retiring MP, John Horam, who, in a varied career had sat on the Labour, SDP and Conservative frontbenches.But Cameron will personally feel the pain of Shaun Bailey's defeat in marginal Hammersmith. The seat saw only a tiny swing away from Labour, depriving the Tory benches of a star, singled out in a video shown at the Tory manifesto launch. Elsewhere in west London, another so-called Cameroon, Joanne Cash, standing for Westminster North, did no better and showed her anger. There was more luck for the Tory Zac Goldsmith, in Richmond Park, who was elected over the Lib Dems on a 7% swing. Among other Tory A-list candidates fast-tracked into seats, Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, the self-declared "black farmer", was beaten by the Lib Dems in Chippenham. And in Wells, Somerset, David Heathcoat-Amory, a long-standing Tory Eurosceptic, suddenly found himself a former MP, after the seat was picked up by the Lib Dems. As if to confirm the erratic picture of the night, much of the rest of the south-west tumbled the other way. Cameron's former press officer, George Eustice won in Camborne and Redruth, a seat, on varied boundaries, that has now elected three different MPs from three parties in three elections. The pattern was just as complex in Cumbria. The Lib Dems crushed the Tories in Westmorland and Lonsdale on a huge swing, but just along the M6, in Carlisle, the Conservatives won a distant hope over Labour on a 7.7% swing. Meanwhile not a single seat changed hands in Scotland, on 2005 results. The Tories cleaned up in Kent. And across the south and east of England the sea of blue brought back memories of the 1980s. There is now no Labour MP in East Anglia; Charles Clarke having lost Norwich South to the Lib Dems thanks to a soaring Green party vote. In the eastern region only the two Luton seats held out for Labour, the independent candidate Esther Rantzen coming a weak fourth. Indeed this was a bad evening for others: Wyre Forest went Tory, while Ukip's bid to beat the speaker, John Bercow, in Buckingham, ended in a weak third place. Lessons for the Tory right, there, perhaps, if they think they can win by tacking to the extremes. Labour had a terrible night but all failure is relative: the greatest single loss of seats at any election since 1931 was almost less shocking than the rollcall of survivors. On top of that Rushanara Ali regained Bethnal Green and Bow, from Respect, and two more female Muslim MPs won in Birmingham and Bolton. But much of the comfort for the party came from Wales, Scotland and England's north. The great New Labour advance of 1997 into the south has been squashed. Outside London in the south-east, only Oxford East (an extraordinary Labour hold against the Lib Dems), Slough, and two seats in Southampton stayed red. However great the Conservative regret at missing out on a majority, the party gained 100 seats, a historic triumph and one that not many years ago looked impossible. In different circumstances, if Brown had called a 2007 election, the Tories would have given their right arm for this outcome. Wales now has eight Tory MPs, up from none in 1997 but far from the 16 the party hoped to get after it came first in votes there in the European elections. Plaid Cymru picked up Arfon, but Ynys Mon swung to Labour. In Scotland, the SNP did no better. In Northern Ireland Sinn Fein topped the poll on 25.5% of the vote, just ahead of the Democratic Unionists, who lost one seat to the Alliance. Meanwhile the Conservative Unionist alliance got nowhere. Sylvia Hermon won the independent-minded and rich seat of North Down. For the Lib Dems this would have been a night to forget, even without the hope created by the leaders' debates. There were the odd bright moments – a predicted gain in Eastbourne from the Tories. But basically the picture was grim. The party will be further depressed by the fact that its vote share rose slightly even as its number of seats fell. It suggests a return of the disease that hurt the alliance in the 1980s: a failure of targeting. In Oxford, for instance, resources were diverted from the supposedly safe West seat to the East; both, in the end, were lost. The party missed out on 10 seats by majorities of 1,000 or less. But that does not excuse the swing to the Tories in Cambridge, held by a new Lib Dem MP, or the loss of Montgomeryshire by Lembit Opik to an active local Tory farmer on a 13.2% swing; the seat has elected Liberals at every election bar two since 1880. Britain is now politically fragmented. Labour scored 42% of the vote in Scotland and 36.2% in Wales, both first places. But in England the Tories were ahead on 39%; in the south-east the party took 49%. It took 284,566 votes to elect one Green MP, about 119,000 votes to elect each Liberal Democrat, about 34,000 to elect each Tory, and 33,000 to elected each Labour MP. No wonder Nick Clegg is on the hunt for a deal on electoral reform. • This article was amended on 13 May 2010. The original omitted Slough when it named seats outside London that had remained Labour in the south-east of England. This has been corrected.