Let me tell you how it was for anyone working for the Labour Party yesterday.

A friend of mine was once sent to Northern Ireland to organise an SDP by-election campaign. It was not a resounding success. On election night she rang through to HQ and started reading the results out in great detail. “There’s no need to give me the figures to two decimal points,” said the party’s national secretary. “Yes there is,” said my friend. “If I don’t do that, we didn’t get anything.”

That’s how it was working for the Labour Party yesterday.

On Thursday night, just after the polls had closed, I was called by a Conservative Shadow minister on his way to the broadcasting studios. He told me that Labour was briefing that it was in meltdown. This is a common ploy – you tell journalists things are going badly wrong and then even a poor result can be described as “better than expected”.

This tactic works quite well. I know that because as a former political staffer I used it myself more than once. But it has a little problem. It doesn’t cover you if the result is genuinely catastrophic, worse even than you prepared people for.

And that is what happened to Labour on Thursday night.

There wasn’t a Basildon moment. In 1992, with Labour hoping that they were heading for victory, the picture of a smiling Tory victor in Basildon suddenly signalled that defeat beckoned. This time the results just kept coming in, relentless in their message, unstoppable and unspinnable.

Gordon Brown is hardly the first to experience a bad night of results. Most leaders have had one of those. And there is a standard procedure. You pass round to your people in the studios a list of your triumphs and the failures of the other party. Every time the presenter mentions your terrible results in, say, Wales, you can say “but David Cameron has failed to break through in the North/cities/rural areas (delete as applicable) and only did a little bit better than Iain Duncan Smith in 2002.” After that you hit the political reset button and promise to listen, to learn and to change.

It wasn’t long before the Cabinet was all at it. As the results rolled in, the script was rolled out and in the studios we heard from Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander and Andy Burnham and Harriet Harman as they read out the listen-and-learn bit.

But as for reading out their own triumphs and the failures of others, this was made difficult by the fact that, er, there weren’t any. That much became clear at about 2am when it emerged that Cameron’s Tories had taken Bury.

The usual postmatch appearance by the party leader is with cheering local party members, fresh from a victory won against the tide. Even when things are pretty bad you can fix one of those. You do it in the afternoon, shirtsleeves, jaw set, contrition, “listen, learn, change”.

Not this time. What we got was Gordon Brown in front of his fireplace expressing disappointment. First thing in the morning, jacket on, clenched teeth. As the day wound on it became clear that disappointment didn’t cut it. But what else could he say?

When the Tories lost elections I remember the TV used to have pictures of party HQ with the flag drooping. It always droops, I used to complain. “The fact that it droops isn’t correlated to the results,” I would say to any passing journalists.

Yesterday I caught a glimpse of the flag at Gordon Brown’s No 10. Definitely drooping. No doubt about it.

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