LABOUR is celebrating after a record-breaking growth in new voters saw the party hold on to Hove and kick the Tories out of Brighton Kemptown.

And Green Caroline Lucas romped home after getting thousands more votes than in 2015 as residents, including big numbers of young first-time voters, delivered crushing defeats to the Conservatives.

A bruising election for Theresa May saw Caroline Ansell defeated in Eastbourne by the Liberal Democrats while others in safe seats had their majorities halved and the Home Secretary clung onto power by fewer than 350 votes in Hastings.

For the third time in two years the county – and the country – is left reeling by the results of an election which confounded the pollsters.

Having lost an overall majority, Theresa May pledged to form a government with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party, the largest party in Northern Ireland.

One of the most overwhelming reversals of the night took place in Brighton Kemptown.

Conservative Simon Kirby is now out of a job after his slim majority of 690 was overturned with a thumping swing to Labour, giving the new MP – former Labour councillor Lloyd Russell-Moyle – a lead of close to 10,000 votes.

In Hove, Peter Kyle transformed his slender 2015 majority of 1,236 into an eye-watering 18,757, winning 66 per cent of the vote and creating a seat among the safest in the country.

More than 81,000 people in the city voted for Labour candidates – as many as voted Conservative, Green, and Liberal Democrat combined.

Caroline Lucas nonetheless doubled her majority in Brighton Pavilion on a night which saw youth turnout leap from 43 per cent in 2015 to an estimated 66 per cent, a collapse of the Ukip vote and tactical voting nationwide.

Former Liberal Democrat MP Stephen Lloyd has retaken his seat in Eastbourne at Caroline Ansell’s expense, while in Hastings, Labour’s Peter Chowney ran Home Secretary Amber Rudd to within 346 votes.

Even in safe Tory seats, the Labour share of the vote doubled in Arundel and South Downs, East Worthing and Shoreham, Mid Sussex, Wealden and Worthing West.

A jubilant Lloyd Russell-Moyle in Brighton Kemptown said: “I put it down to the fact we spoke to so many people – 65 per cent of the population in the constituency personally.

“We have pounded the pavements and we have made sure that politics is in the community and in the streets rather than just some abstract quantity on the television stations.”

The striking exception to the left-of-centre march came in Lewes, where a canny campaign by Maria Caulfield and her team saw off a challenge from the Liberal Democrats, despite the Greens having stood aside to try to unseat the former nurse.

Analysis by The Argus of results county-wide reveals the Conservatives held on to the voters they wooed in 2015 but Labour was the beneficiary of huge numbers of anti-Tory voters and of a massive increase in youth turnout.

While Theresa May’s party added 50,000 Sussex votes to its 2015 total, Labour added 112,000.

Such was the scale of a Labour surge that Jeremy Corbyn won 57,000 more votes in Sussex than Tony Blair did in his 1997 landslide.