For Labour, the awfulness of these shambles of a Super Thursday was nowhere more cruelly betrayed – though unwittingly – than by the party’s own chairman, Hazel Blears. To the shambles, and Scotland, in a moment, but first to Ms Blears’s curious admission. Trying to explain the loss of a Cardiff seat, she was reported as protesting that the seat was, after all, “an affluent, middle-class” area. Precisely. And it has been by winning affluent middle-class support that Labour has governed Britain these past ten years. When that goes, its predominance goes. The party is back to bedrock.

Support from about one voter in four must be pretty close to bedrock. If, as Tony Blair claimed yesterday, these election results were “a springboard for victory”, then show me a springboard for defeat. These were dreadful results for the Labour Party. No ifs, no buts, no “not as bad as we feared”. Just dreadful.

It is always possible for party spin-doctors to spread the idea that they were braced for something even worse; that old trick should fool nobody, though elements within the BBC appear to have been taken in. To register some 27 per cent support nationally, when your principal challengers are registering around 40 per cent, to hear your First Minister in once-impregnable Wales declare that “we haven’t won but we haven’t exactly lost”, to be chased out of councils across those swaths of England that Ms Blears would no doubt write off as “middle class” – to be chased even out of Birmingham – is dismal.

For the Liberal Democrats I believe these results are worse than dismal. I have argued that Labour is down to bedrock; but Labour does have a bedrock, and bedrock is firm. Liberal Democrat support is soft almost all the way through. For this party momentum is everything: an impression of motion can be the most exciting thing about a small party. The laws of gyroscopics dictate both to spinning tops and to Liberal Democrats that if you stop moving you may fall over. Caught between two main parties in close contention for government, the Liberal Democrats could sink at the next general election. To run out of steam, mid-term, when the ruling party is plumbing near-record depths of unpopularity must be deeply worrying for Sir Menzies Campbell. It will worry Labour, too, who are the beneficiaries of Lib Dem raids into Tory territory.

As for the Tories, David Cameron’s description of the results as “stunning” overstates. They are less than that but they are pretty good. Before yesterday Labour was putting it assiduously about that anything less than a 600-seat gain for the Tories should be counted a failure. That was never true – but in the event the Tories have done a great deal better anyway. Across what we might call natural Conservative terrain in England the party has come close to cleaning up.

The Tories have strengthened a little in Wales. Across those parts of northern England where they want to conquer new territory their advance has been patchy, with some disappointments and some encouraging successes; but if I hear one more BBC voice announcing that the Conservative Party “haven’t got a single seat in Manchester or Liverpool” I shall scream. If “Manchester” means the city – a small area with quite a small population – then it’s true there are no Tory seats, but citadels like that would only tumble in a landslide. All around “Manchester” the Conservative Party is on the advance. And Liverpool is by no means an example of “the kind of place where the Tories need to make inroads”. It isn’t; they won’t; and that doesn’t really matter.

Vivid – even gripping – as these events may seem to some of us at the time, it’s as well to remember that even for anoraks like me, local government elections do tend to fade quite fast in the memory, all merging into each other. Scotland, however, will not fade. It is for the Scottish parliamentary results that May 3, 2007 is likely to be remembered. This is for reasons beyond the disgraceful failure of the Scottish bureaucracy properly to test its new voting forms before springing them on a bewildered electorate, but let us start with those.

Confronted with a form that says “you have two votes”, I too might have thought I had two votes and that this applied to each list. Add this to problems with automatic counting machines and postal votes – and to the evidence from England that with mass postal voting, large-scale fraud can only be avoided by onerous and discouraging checks – and is nobody tempted towards the conclusion that it would be better simply to revert to the old 20th-century system?

What was supposed to be wrong with the idea of voting at a polling station unless you could show that this was difficult? What was ever wrong with the old manual system of counting, which seemed to deliver results at least as fast, and sometimes faster, than the new arrangements? The difficulties with which we seem to have landed ourselves arise from an attempt to find a solution to a problem that never existed in the first place. It wasn’t difficult to vote. The old system worked fine. Why not go back to it and scrap the so-called reforms?

In the days ahead, Scotland ’07 may become nearly as famous for us as Dale County and the hanging chads became for Americans. But there is an ultimately more interesting reason for studying these results. For many in Britain, south as well as north of the Border, this election may be the first time that the business of coalition-making impinges on the popular imagination as an integral part of the politics of the future. Alex Salmond, with his radical plans and riveting communications skills, may see to that.

What are the unwritten rules? Nobody is yet sure. May I suggest one that I believe may come to seem persuasive? It is that after an election which a big party in government is popularly seen as having “lost” in the face of a strong challenge by a second party, a third party that comes to the rescue of this “loser” and, by forming a coalition or any kind of a working arrangement with it, helps it to stay in power despite an electoral humiliation, will not be seen as having acted in a legitimate manner.

The Liberal Democrats would be most unwise to do this in Scotland. I could hardly believe my ears yesterday morning when I heard Sir Menzies virtually pledge that his party would deal only with the Labour Party when it comes to forming a Scottish government. He said there could be no cooperation with a party that wanted independence, or even a referendum on independence. Yet the SNP is the party that has topped the polls. A Lib-Lab pact for government in Edinburgh would be a terrible blunder. The phraseology leaps unprompted from the lips: “propping up”, “rescuing”, “defying the popular will” . . . this would be a gift for the SNP.

Despite his optimistic talk, Alex Salmond must quail at the prospect of trying to run a minority government – with or without coalition allies – in Scotland. A Lib-Lab pact would relieve him of that task. I cannot conceive of a better launchpad for the Scottish independence movement than a squalid deal between the two parties who did badly in the election of 2007 to keep out of power the party that did well. If Sir Menzies meant what he said yesterday, Mr Salmond is lucky indeed.

Our national general election is now likely to be in 2010 – for why would Gordon Brown call an election before he has to, unless he is well ahead in the polls – a circumstance that looks unlikely? Mr Cameron may emerge as leader of the largest party, but lack an overall majority. He must hope the Lib Dems will repeat the mistake they seem resolved to make in Scotland – and try to prop Mr Brown up for another term.

On the basis of this Thursday’s vote, however, there seems a slight danger that Mr Cameron may get a slim overall majority. Super Thursday worries me, and should worry him.

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