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Election results: Labour's shadow foreign secretary has just lost his seat to a 20-year-old SNP student

Douglas Alexander was the first of many Labour casualties in Scotland

Matt Dathan
Friday 08 May 2015 10:15 BST
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Douglas Alexander
Douglas Alexander

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Labour's shadow foreign secretary and Ed Miliband's election chief has just lost his seat to a 20-year-old Scottish nationalist.

Douglas Alexander lost to an SNP student - Mhairi Black - who beat the former Labour cabinet minister by a margin of 5,684 votes.

Ms Black, set to be the youngest MP in Parliament and the youngest since the 19th century, managed to overturn Mr Alexander's huge 16,000 majority.

Accepting defeat, Mr Alexander said: "This has been a very difficult night for Labour. Scotland has chosen to oppose this Conservative government, but not placed its trust in the Labour Party. It will be our responsibility to re-win that trust in the months and years ahead."

Mr Alexander first entered Parliament in a November 1997 by-election. He has served in three Cabinet posts - transport, Scotland and international development - and would have been one or Mr Miliband's most experienced ministers had he taken office again.

Despite backing David Miliband for the Labour leadership, Mr Alexander has been a constant presence, alongside Ed Balls, around the Labour leader. And he has been a key player in the party's campaigns for many years, co-ordinating the successful 2001 campaign and leading the doomed 2010 effort for Gordon Brown.

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Mr Alexander would have been likely to take on one of the great offices of state as Foreign Secretary, taking Mr Miliband's message around the globe and into the European Union.

The battle to protect his seat saw high-profile interventions, including Gordon Brown, who promised voters he would be "a leading Scot in a Labour government".

The tone for the night was set when nationalist Alan Brown won the first seat of the night in Scotland, with 30,000 votes.

That saw him unseat Labour's Cathy Jamieson to become the new MP for Kilmarnock and Loudoun.

When SNP depute leader Stewart Hosie was returned as the MP for Dundee East, it took his party's tally to 12 - making it officially their best ever result in a Westminster election and double the tally from the 2010 election.

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