RESULT: Lib Dem Ed Davey takes Kingston & Surbiton seat from Conservatives

The Liberal Democrats have snatched Kingston and Surbiton from the conservatives by 4,124 votes.

Sir Ed Davey returns as an MP for Kingston and Surbiton, which he previously served from 1997 to 2015, until he lost to James Berry, Conservative.

He has previously served in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change from 2012 to 2015, and was Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, with responsibility for Employment Relations, Consumer and Postal Affairs, since 2010.

Sir Davey said: “I’m very excited and very honoured, there is a lot of work to do, I know having been an MP for 18 years, there’s a lot of hard work in both the local area and in parliament and with an unclear result in parliament, there’s, even more, pressure to find solutions for people.”

He added: “Well we’re certainly improving and we’re going to make progress, it wasn’t the size of the progress we would have liked, the loss of Nick Clegg is particularly upsetting for us, but we made some really good gains so we’ll have a parliamentary party with real talent and quality to be able to bring real analysis, thought and principle to the debates ahead of us.”

Labour candidate Laurie South said: “On the doorstep, a lot of people just didn’t want the Tories, certainly a lot of Labour supporters said that they’d like to vote Labour, but actually we would still rather not have the Tories, so we’re going to hold our nose and vote Lib Dem.”