The UK prime minister Boris Johnson will push his Brexit deal through Parliament "in relatively short order" and meet the 31 January deadline for the country to leave the European Union, a senior member of his team has said.

Michael Gove, whose role is to effectively deputize for the prime minister, said in an interview on Sky News: "We will be in a position to leave the European Union before 31 January next year.

"And then we will have concluded our conversations with the EU about the new framework of free trade and friendly cooperation that we will have with them by the end of next year."

Johnson, whose party won 365 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons in the UK general election on Thursday, based his campaign on the promise to "get Brexit done.”

MPs are due to return to Parliament on Tuesday, with Johnson thought likely to set out his party's legislative plans in a Queen's Speech on Thursday and then bring forward a key vote to back his Brexit plan on Friday, before Parliament takes a Christmas break.

The Conservatives' majority of 80 is well beyond the number needed to pass legislation and large enough for the prime minister to be able to withstand any rebellions by small numbers of MPs at both ends of the party.

^{CGTN Europe's Andrew Wilson on the week ahead for Boris Johnson}

Meanwhile, in other post-election developments, the opposition Labour Party continues to focus on why it produced its worst performance in terms of MPs elected, since 1935.

Leader Jeremy Corbyn said, in an article in The Observer newspaper, he was "sorry we came up short," and said the Conservatives' "dishonest" Brexit message and a hostile media were among the reasons for their disappointing performance.

He said that the polarisation over Brexit meant "we paid a price for being seen by some as trying to straddle that divide or re-run the referendum."

But Corbyn wrote that he was proud to have "rewritten the terms of political debate "on austerity, on corporate power, on inequality and on the climate emergency."

In Scotland, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) won 48 out of 55 seats in the election, the SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said the election results provided the mandate for a fresh independence referendum.

She told the BBC: "It's a fundamental point of democracy - you can't hold Scotland in the union against its will."

Scotland voted by 55 percent to 45 percent to stay as part of the UK in an independence referendum in 2014.

Since then, the SNP has dominated elections in the country and it was the part of the UK most opposed to the UK leaving the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum - 62 percent of people were opposed to the idea.