Could be the worst result for Labour since 1935:

If the exit poll is right, this election will transform British politics

It looks like a triumph for Boris Johnson, and an epochal collapse for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour. The Jeremy Corbyn project has taken what is surely a terminal beating

By Martin Kettle @ TheGuardian.com, 12 Dec 2019 23.20 GMT

For the last four UK general elections, bar 2015, the 10pm exit poll on election day has been almost exactly correct, even if sometimes the predictions have been a shock to many experts. So the likelihood is that the pollsters have got it right again in 2019. But whereas in 2017 their correct prediction of a hung parliament guaranteed a embattled legislature, the 2019 prediction may even transform British politics.

This election looks to be a triumph for the Conservatives under Boris Johnson. Their strategy of calling an early election and their campaign and messaging tactics during the last few weeks has been vindicated, with a predicted 368 seats in the new parliament, a majority of 86 over all other parties, and an incontrovertible mandate to take the UK out of the European Union in January.

If the exit poll is even broadly right, the message for the Tory party is of an historic recovery after the humiliations of the New Labour era. It transforms all recent analysis of the party’s place in UK politics, reuniting it with its reputation as the most resilient and successful election-winning party in Europe. The party has not won a comfortable working majority since 1987. A majority of 86 would mean Johnson can govern for a full five-year term, even though his promise to repeal the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act means he is likely not to take the country into another December election in 2024.

The victory is undeniably Johnson’s. A year ago he was on the backbenches. A majority of Tory MPs did not want him as their leader in the summer. Now he is the master of the British political scene, and will be able to pick his own cabinet, demand his MPs’ backing for his Brexit strategy (which may differ significantly from the one he has led his party to expect). He now has little reason to worry about Nigel Farage’s Brexit party either [....].

I took a quick look at Kettle's record as a columnist over the last few months, he seems to be rather centrist, to have criticized Johnson at times, and a bit preferential to the Lib Dems. He wrote this in September, which might have been prescient:

Johnson’s plan is to turn his supreme court humiliation into rocket fuel at the polls

A pumped-up prime minister is betting that the judges’ decision will play well for him with leave voters

lots like this on Twitter

the man behind the win: