Among other fascinating features, the elections for more than 10,000 council seats in England produced the first teenager to be voted into this office. The sixth-former concerned might have learnt two valuable things as he surveyed the rest of these results.

The first is that the colour of your rosette counts for a lot, but there is enough variety, even in a year with a strong party pattern, to suggest that local variations do occur. The other is that it is extremely risky to cut back on rubbish collections.

Sir Menzies Campbell described the Liberal Democrats’ performance on Thursday night as a “mixed bag”, which is true even if his party arguably drew the booby prize from it. There were shifts that contradicted each other even within the same region of the country. Why the Liberal Democrats should have become stronger in Hull while weaker in Sheffield (or dominant in Eastbourne while being slaughtered in Torbay) is not immediately obvious. Nor is the reason why Labour was wiped out in most of its few enclaves in the South East such as Dartford, Gravesham and Woking while holding a majority in Stevenage.

The Conservatives could not crack some of their key targets in Lancashire that begin with the letter B, notably Bury and Bolton, but managed to evict the top tier of the Labour leadership in Blackpool. Perhaps it was the bruising which that town felt after it failed to be awarded the first supercasino. Manchester, which secured that prize (until the House of Lords blocked it), certainly did not thank the Tories for their intervention against it.

David Cameron remains some distance from securing a single councillor in that city, Liverpool or Newcastle. On the other hand, his prospects are brighter in Birmingham, where the Conservatives have become the largest party for the first time since the 1983 local elections which were conducted just before Mrs Thatcher was re-elected by a famous landslide margin. Confused? You should be. Some of the candidates (both those who won and lost) must have been mightily more perplexed.

And then there was what might be described as the “rubbish factor”. This is probably the only example of a local issue that manifested itself in a multitude of places. Liberal Democrats who had introduced fortnightly visits to dustbins with extensive recycling on alternate weeks were not exactly rewarded for their devotion to environmental duty. Far from it. The party saw a host of serving councillors binned in Waverley, Surrey, and equally spectacularly in Bournemouth.

The rubbish factor might also explain why Labour lost Telford by a heavy margin, the Conservatives let slip North Lincolnshire and Salisbury moved into No Overall Control. On balance, this wheelie bin revolt helped to boost Tory numbers. It does, nonetheless, raise the question as to whether the theme of “vote blue, go green” will be a winner for David Cameron in the longer term.

That there was a variety in these results does not mean that they lacked trends. The most obvious one was the advance in Conservative councillors. The net gain for the Tories, which exceeded 800 in the end, was definitely at the top of the range of the party’s own predictions and the reasonable expectations of neutral observers. It was larger than a straightforward extrapolation of the Tories’ share of the supposed “national vote” (a piece of fiction invented by television in many ways) would have estimated. This cannot be but helpful to Mr Cameron in dealing with his own party.

There were some less favourable aspects for him that should not be forgotten. The Conservatives went to enormous efforts yesterday to assert that there had been a “breakthrough” in “the North” and that the media’s initial reaction that anyone beyond the Watford Gap looked at Notting Hill Man with suspicion was utterly unfounded. There is some validity to their claims but few Tory insiders could really contend that their party is in as robust a condition in the North West, North East and Yorkshire/Humberside as they would care for.

The ballots in the West and East Midlands were also a little patchy. If Mr Cameron is to present himself as a plausible Prime Minister in waiting, then his party will have to do better in similar seats next year.

For the other two main parties, the surprise was that their defeats were relatively evenly distributed between them. Labour got clobbered in the South East and South West, so much so that it fielded candidates in barely half of the seats in the former region and scarcely a third in the latter.

If Mr Brown is to lead his colleagues to a fourth parliamentary majority, then his principal task is to demonstrate that Labour can make up lost ground in the South, starting with the 2008 London Mayoral and Assembly elections. The Liberal Democrats suffered much more than they had anticipated. Their drive against Labour in the North did not amount to much and they were pushed back by Mr Cameron in the South. At this rate, they will be hard pressed to retain the 22 per cent of the national vote and the 62 MPs that they won last time at the next general election. It might be tough for them to hold on to 20 per cent and 50 seats on present standards.

But such is the paradoxical character of modern politics that this might not matter. If Labour cannot recover in the South of England, then it will find it almost impossible to maintain a majority in the House of Commons come the next hustings. If Mr Cameron cannot start piling up votes in Lancashire constituencies beginning with B (bar Blackpool) then he will discover that it is equally difficult, if not more so, for him to reach the magical figure of 326 seats that will constitute more than half of the chamber after polling day. The Liberal Democrats could thus do worse at the ballot box but find themselves, as they are in Scotland and Wales, cast as political kingmakers. They would be wise not to interfere with domestic waste, just to be on the safe side.

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