The seats Nigel Farage's Reform UK would have won if exit poll had been right
Nigel Farage has been elected as the MP for Clacton-on-Sea, finally entering Parliament after seven other attempts.
Reform UK won four seats in Parliament in its first general election. However, the party had been projected for a 13-seat clinch in the exit poll released just as polling stations across the country were closing, at 10pm on July 4.
One of the seats snatched by the six-year-old party was Clacton-on-Sea, where Reform UK leader Nigel Farage stood. The constituency granted Mr Farage 21,225 votes and a majority of 8,405 over Conservative candidate Giles Watling, who had held the seat since 2017.
Richard Tice, Reform UK’s chair and previous leader of the party, also snatched a seat from a Tory MP. After gaining 15,520 votes in Boston and Skegness, deemed one of the safest Conservative seats in the country, Mr Tice hailed the success of Reform UK as the beginning of a "people's revolt".
Elsewhere, Lee Anderson successfully defended his seat in Ashfield, and the former Southampton football club chairman, Rupert Lowe, won a seat in Great Yarmouth as he beat the Labour candidate by 1,426 and relegated the Tory candidate to third place.
The exit poll, led by Professor Sir John Curtice, rightly predicted a landslide win for Labour and a crushing defeat for the Conservative Party, but overestimated the success of Reform UK due to the tight margins seen in some constituencies.
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One of the other constituencies where Reform UK had initially been projected to win was Bassetlaw, BirminghamLive wrote, which saw instead Labour taking the seat from the Tories.
Other constituencies believed to have been projected to become Reform UK seats were Barnsley North and Barnsley South, both held by Labour, and Hartlepool another seat Sir Keir Starmer's party managed to retain.
Reform UK came second in dozens of constituencies, splitting the right-leaning vote and often pushing third Tory candidates. Mr Farage's party got more than four million votes - only 2.8 million fewer than the Tories and 5.7 fewer than Labour.
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Speaking about the accuracy of the exit poll when it came to small parties and Reform UK in particular, Prof Curtice told the BBC last night, as the vote counting had just begun: "It looks as though Reform may win more seats than many polls suggested.
"This is largely because, not only has the Conservative vote fallen far in seats they previously held, but also because Reform has advanced most in areas people voted Leave in the 2016 EU referendum.
"However, how many seats Reform will win is highly uncertain – our model suggests there are many places where they have some - but a relatively low - chance of winning."
