Cameron returned to Downing Street after UK hand Tories a slim majority

U.K. voters have handed Prime Minister David Cameron an emphatic election victory, overturning predictions of a tight ballot and giving the Conservative Party an absolute majority in Parliament in a crushing defeat for Labour.

Before Thursday’s vote, many expected a hung Parliament — a result that would have led to messy attempts by either Cameron or Labour’s Ed Miliband to forge a coalition with smaller parties.

Instead, the Tory vote was stronger than had been suggested, and Labour suffered at the ballot box, being all but wiped out in Scotland and failing to make inroads in the rest of the country. The Conservatives took 331 of the possible 650 seats. Labour trailed with 232 and the Liberal Democrats — punished by voters for entering into a coalition in 2010 with the Tories and abandoning key pledges — was reduced to just eight seats, down from 57. They were pushed into fourth place by the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), which took dozens of seats in Scotland, mainly from Labour.

After disastrous results for their parties in the election, the leaders of three parties stepped down in the space of about an hour Friday: Miliband, Nigel Farage of the anti-EU U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) and Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats. Miliband said he wanted to resign straight away so the party can rebuild itself. 

Despite the unexpectedly decisive outcome for the Conservatives — before the vote, some warned that no party would be able to cobble together a workable coalition — questions remain over the direction the U.K. will take on some key issues, notably whether Britain will stay in the European Union. Cameron has pledged an in/out referendum on the matter.

And the strength of nationalist vote in Scotland may put the question of Scottish independence back to the fore. The SNP swept aside Labour, meaning that Scotland, which voted in the fall to stay in the United Kingdom, will send just three representatives of major British parties to Parliament and be all but shut out of the Cabinet. That could revive calls for it to leave Britain.

Cameron's victory means Britain will probably see a vote on continued membership in the EU. He says he wants to stay in the bloc, but only if he secures changes to its rules in negotiations that have not yet begun.

Cameron returned, smiling, to the prime minister's office on Downing Street early on Friday.

The Conservatives' majority in Parliament will mean that they will now govern alone for the first time since 1992.

Cameron sounded a conciliatory note, especially toward Scotland, likely to be his first headache. "I want my party — and, I hope, a government I would like to lead — to reclaim a mantle we should never have lost, the mantle of one nation, one United Kingdom," he said.

With votes from almost all of Scotland's 59 parliamentary constituencies counted, the Scottish National Party (SNP) won 56 seats, up from just six five years ago, all but obliterating Labour in one of its traditional strongholds.

"We're seeing an electoral tsunami on a gigantic scale," said Alex Salmond, the party's former leader, now elected to represent it in London. "The SNP are going to be impossible to ignore and very difficult to stop." He added that the result strips Cameron of any legitimacy in Scotland, where his Conservative Party will have only one minister in Parliament.

In a body blow to Labour, Douglas Alexander, the party's campaign chief and foreign policy spokesman, lost his seat to a 20-year-old Scottish nationalist student. Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy was also toppled.

One other loser is the opinion polling industry, which is likely to face questions over its failure to predict the outcome. Before the election, virtually all opinion polls showed the Conservatives and Labour neck and neck.

Al Jazeera and wire services