Election results live 2015: David Cameron wins UK general election

Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage stood down as leaders of their parties today as the Conservatives won the most unpredictable election in a generation.

Polling inquest: YouGov and Co need to provide answers Ed Miliband resigns after Labour's election 'bloodbath'

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The SNP has won a landslide victory in Scotland, claiming 56 out of a possible 59 seats. The SNP took 50 new seats, largely from Labour, which has been left with just one MP in Scotland. The Liberal Democrats also lost nine seats, but managed to hold Orkney and Shetland. The Conservatives held onto Dumfrieshshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale - the only other seat to survive the "SNP tsunami", the BBC reports. The results represent an "astonishing victory" for the SNP, The Guardian says.

"I want to bring our country together, our United Kingdom together," says David Cameron, having retained his seat in Witney. He avoids claiming outright victory, but says he hopes to form a government that will govern in the interests of everyone in the UK. After saying that he will work to implement further devolution for Scotland and Wales, Cameron tweets the key message of his speech: "One nation, one United Kingdom - that is how I hope to govern if I am fortunate enough to continue as Prime Minister."

Having held the seat of Doncaster North, the Labour leader gives a short speech in which he acknowledges that the nationwide result has come as a disappointment and apologises to his party's supporters. The next government will face a huge challenge in keeping the country together, he says, and "if we believe in a United Kingdom we should stand up for people in every part of the United Kingdom." The BBC's Andrew Marr says it is "as close to a concession speech as you'll hear".

After retaining his seat with a much reduced majority, Nick Clegg dropped a strong hint that he will soon resign. He promises to make an announcement about his future later this morning, after talking to party activists. Former leader Paddy Ashdown has sent an email to Lib Dem members, describing a "bitter night" of results."Let us remember what we fought for - liberal values, offering a vibrant, positive, and hopeful alternative for our country," he wrote. "However painful this defeat, our fight for all this party stands for must continue." Ashdown may experience some personal pain: when the exit poll came in he promised to eat his hat if the Lib Dems ended up with only ten seats. They may be lucky to get into double figures.

Having dodged David Dimbleby's inevitable questions about the Conservative party leadership, Boris Johnson turns his attention to the future of the UK. The country, he says, should move towards a federal structure in order to defuse nationalist tensions. He also said that he welcomed the prospect of a referendum on British membership of the EU, to which Cameron has committed himself. Earlier, having won his Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat, Johnson had said that the British people "have decisively rejected any attempt to take the country back to the 1970s" and "want us to go forward with sensible moderate policies".

The Lib Dems were not expecting to do well at this election, but they have underperformed even by their own gloomy forecasts. Their seat count may not even get into double figures, and any hopes they may have had of holding the balance of power appear to have evaporated. PA reports that a "grim-faced" Clegg was asked whether he would resign as he arrived at the count in his Sheffield Hallam constituency, but he ignored the question. Some commentators suggest that he may have no choice: reports that he may lose his seat, which had receded in recent days, are doing the rounds once again.

Until the polls closed at 10pm last night, few people were predicting that Ed Miliband's position as Labour leader would be under threat. His personal ratings had improved, and he had, it seemed, kept pace with the Conservatives despite an improving economy and doubts about Labour's economic credibility. But the exit poll, and the results that have come in since then, have begun to pile pressure on Miliband. "Every Labour figure being interviewed is being asked if Ed Miliband should stay as leader," The Guardian says. "They have all either sidestepped the question, or said yes, but in private Labour figures are saying something different." Sky's Sophy Ridge says MPs are telling her in private that Miliband must go, and former Labour foreign secretary Jack Straw seems less than certain about his leader's future. Describing the results as "pretty depressing", he says "it's up to Mr Miliband to decide his own future".

The SNP leader hasn't given up hope of deposing David Cameron. "The SNP stand ready and willing to work with Labour to lock David Cameron out of Westminster," she said. Despite the huge SNP advance in Scotland, however, Labour may not have done well enough to keep the Tories out. The exit poll suggests that Labour will end up with 239 seats and the SNP 58, giving them a total of 297. The Conservatives are on course to get 316 on their own.

The first big scalp of the evening. Shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander has lost to the SNP in Paisley and Renfrewshire South, whose new MP is a 20-year-old student. Mhairi Black, who will return to university to complete her exams before taking her seat in the House of Commons, will be the youngest MP since 1667, Buzzfeed reports. The swing from Labour to the SNP has reached 35 per cent in some Scottish constituencies. That compares with a swing from the Conservatives to Labour of about ten per cent in the 1997 landslide.

The one certainty in this most uncertain of elections was supposed to be that no party could get a majority. Now that too is in doubt. John Curtice, who helped to design the exit poll which predicted that the Conservatives would end up with 316 seats now says that Cameron's party appears to be outperforming even that unexpected forecast. The result in Nuneaton, and highly competitive constituency in which both parties campaigned hard, had been expected to show a two per cent swing to Labour. In fact it produced a two per cent swing to the Tories, and that, says Curtice, could mean that Cameron is on course to command a narrow Commons majority without needing to rely on the support of any other party. The Guardian's Alberto Nardelli agrees. "If anything the exit poll may well have underestimated the number of seats the Tories will win and overestimated Labour's share," he writes. "It's not even out of the question that Cameron may get an overall majority."

Soon after the publication of the exit poll, Michael Gove suggested that David Cameron would be keen to keep the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition alive. "If this exit poll is correct, that gives the Prime Minister considerable authority," Gove said, and he will want "to ensure that we have a strong, stable and secure government that we argued for and that it seems the country has backed". But it is not clear that the Lib Dems will retain enough MPs to make up the numbers, and nor that they would want to stick with the arrangement that appears to have led to their near-wipeout. "if the Lib Dem losses are on the scale suggested, it would leave the party so weakened that it might play no significant role in any post-election dealmaking," the Financial Times suggests. "Those Lib Dem MPs who survive election night may conclude the party needs to rebuild its fortunes in opposition, even were Mr Cameron to offer some kind of deal."

With only three constituencies having declared, most analysis is still based on the exit poll, which suggests that the Conservatives will be the largest party by a significant margin. But is it accurate? Labour figures are keen to play up doubts, and with good reason. "The Labour tribe – and the polling fraternity – are haunted by the experience of 1992, when the 10pm poll prepared the nation for Prime Minister Neil Kinnock," writes Jonathan Freedland for The Guardian. Nevertheless, he says, "exit polling has come a long way since 1992. Indeed, the exit poll issued in 2010 turned out to have called it just about right." The Daily Telegraph also notes the accuracy of the exit poll at the last general election, but adds a caveat. "Experts conceded that the accuracy of this year’s exit poll could be reduced because of the rise of the SNP in Scotland," it says. And Bloomberg reports that John Curtice, one of the academics involved in compiling the exit poll, has acknowledged that it is "likely to be imprecise and may well be wrong".

The first three constituencies to declare, all in Sunderland, are safe Labour seats and there are no upsets as far as the winners are concerned. What may unsettle the main parties, and particularly Labour, is that Ukip has come second in all three of them. This is part of Nigel Farage's party's "2020 strategy", in which they position themselves as the natural opposition to Labour in the north and the Conservatives in the south, giving themselves a springboard from which to win seats across the country at the 2020 general election.

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