The loss of 317 seats on the night was not the meltdown that some in the party had feared but Labour nevertheless suffered one of its worst results, getting 26 per cent of the vote and losing 18 councils, mainly in London and the South East.

The council political map is swinging back to a traditional North-South divide as Labour largely held its vote in the party’s northern heartlands.

Tony Travers, a local government specialist at the London School of Economics, said: “The farther you go up the M1, the better Labour has done.

“If Labour isn’t careful it will lose its foothold in the South in the same way that the Tories have done in the North, and find it equally difficult to make a comeback.”

The backlash against Labour in London was worse than predicted, with Labour losing nine of its fifteen boroughs, including three of its flagship councils: Camden, Ealing and Hammersmith & Fulham. Labour lost 11 seats in Camden, 19 in Ealing, 17 in Hammersmith and 23 in Bexley, with huge swings to the Tories.

The bellwether borough of Ealing was a particularly bad loss for the party, as the local election vote has predicted the subsequent general election result in every poll but one for 40 years.

The London results were the worst for Labour since 1968, when it polled 28.5 per cent and held only three boroughs. As predicted, the Tories gained several outer London councils directly from Labour, including Croydon and Bexley. Labour also lost Brent, Lewisham, Hounslow and Merton to no overall control and only just managed to cling on to Haringey.

Labour’s sole consolation in the capital was gaining Lambeth from no overall control.

While many blamed the events of the past nine days, other factors also affected London, with left-wing, anti-Iraq war Labour voters in Camden splitting between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats.

Mr Travers said that the capital’s results should present a wake-up call for the Government to provide further resources for rail, Tube and other public services to improve Londoners’ quality of life.

Overall, the Labour vote was similar to that of 2004 but much worse than 2002, when the same council seats were up for election. Mr Travers said that given the scale of the mayhem in the ten days before polling day, the results were not as bad as they might have been.

“The loss of these seats is reverting to the normal type of midterm result, when governments tend to do quite badly. The result is somewhere been a drama and a crisis. It is a good old-fashioned, bad result for a party in power rather than a complete meltdown,” he said.

Times Recommends

• Over and out: former para on why he quit
• What links a cheesy musical and a pickled cow?
• EU rediscovers taste for bendy cucumbers