As polls predicted, and there was little reason to believe they would be inaccurate, there was a new prime minister in No. 10 Downing Street announced at lunch time.
For months, the British opinion polls have predicted a huge win for the Labour Party over the ruling Conservatives and it was hard to see a scenario in which the pollsters will have been proven wrong.
As matters played out as they were expected, Friday was a rare day of change in London that everybody around the world, and especially in Israel, should watch carefully and seek to emulate.
When the British electorate delivered its verdict, it expected action, and swift action it got.
The wheels of British politics whir at a dizzying pace after the people have voted. New administrations take office immediately. Labour wound up with the needed 326 seats or more in the House of Commons, they can now rule without the need for horse-trading.
The predictions said that they would get many more than the overall majority threshold but you can be sure that they will not turn their political dominance into a dictatorship and disregard accepted political behavior.
The “it’s not the done thing” maxim holds firm in British politics and traditions are followed.
Proportional representation is a common electoral system in many democracies but the British first-past-the-post system has proven consistently to be decisive, even though many voters’ voices are never heard as loudly as they should be.
14 years of conservative governance
For the past 14 years, Britain has been governed by the Conservatives, there have been five prime ministers in succession (David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak), but as they have all been from the same party, the dramatic element of change has been less pronounced.
This time, borrowing a phrase that Boris Johnson used when he was forced out of No. 10 by his colleagues: “When the herd moves, it moves.” Friday will be more like a stampede than a herd moving from one pasture to the next at a leisurely pace.
Friday was out with the old and in with the new but blink and you might miss it. Sunak will be out of office officially today and Keir Starmer will be the new prime minister.
The mechanism of the transfer of power is straightforward, no ifs or buts.
Sunak was driven from No. 10 to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation to King Charles. Before he gets into his armored Range Rover for the short ride, he will concede defeat and thank his aides and political colleagues for their support during his time in office.
The severe defeat will probably result in him owning up to his and his party’s failures. The gathered media and the British people will watch him with the famous gleaming black door as his backdrop and they will pick through every word.
He probably won’t have the same privilege again to speak as prime minister and it will be his penultimate act. The last one will be the handshake with the king.
Unlike another recent electoral defeat, this will be an honorable concession, there will be no question of Sunak or anybody else offering even a hint that the election was stolen or fixed, or that he had actually won but that somehow, the results don’t quite bear that out.
Starmer will be summoned to the palace 30 minutes after Sunak leaves and he will be invited by the king to form a new administration.
Anybody who watched The Crown will have seen this scenario enacted between Queen Elizabeth and her 15 prime ministers over the decades.
When he strides towards No. 10 accompanied by his family, he will be magnanimous towards his predecessor and will say that he’s going in to start working immediately.
During today, removal vans will draw up outside the rear of No. 10 to extract all the Sunak family belongings and they will be supplanted by those of the Starmers’.
No boxes of classified documents will be taken for storage in the Sunaks’ bathroom at their new home – that is certain.
While in the 1960s and ‘70s Conservatives and Labour swapped places fairly frequently, as Harold Wilson, Ted Heath and Jim Callaghan failed to win large majorities, that changed after the emergence of Margaret Thatcher.
As leader of the Conservatives and then with her right-hand-man John Major, the party ruled from 1979 to 1997.
When Labour’s Tony Blair trounced Major as the British electorate voted to boot out the Conservatives, the change in leadership style was apparent, and the sight of the packers loading items of the old administration were a clear manifestation of the change that the electorate had sought.
It was a sight that had not been seen for 18 years.
The Labour administration of Tony Blair-Gordon Brown was voted out in 2010 and a Conservative-led government has mostly ruled Britain in the years since.
Now, after 14 years, the time for change has come again and Brits are most likely to be governed by a Labour government for the foreseeable future.
Brits don’t like and don’t want upheaval and revolution but when they see the removal vans moving in, they will know that their votes have delivered the outcome that they sought.