Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, secured a crushing victory in the UK’s general election as voters backed his promise to “get Brexit done” and take the country out of the European Union by 31 January next year. Johnson’s Conservatives captured 364 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons with all bar one seat counted, a comfortable majority of 74 and the party’s best showing in a parliamentary election since Margaret Thatcher triumphed in 1987. He addressed the nation just after 7am in London, saying Brexit was now the “irrefutable, irresistible, unarguable decision of the British people” and promising those who lent their vote to the Tories in traditional Labour areas: “I will not let you down.” Earlier, in his seat of Uxbridge and West Ruislip west of London, he said the government had been given “a powerful new mandate to get Brexit done … I think this will turn out to be a historic election that gives us now, in this new government, the chance to respect the democratic will of the British people”. As results from across the country suggested the exit poll would prove correct and seat after seat in the opposition Labour party’s strongholds swung…