The Gordon Brown honeymoon continues. Labour comfortably held on to Ealing Southall and Sedgefield, while the confirmation by the Crown Prosecution Service yesterday that there would be no charges over the cash-for-peerages affair removes what could have been a very damaging distraction. Paradoxically, the party leader with the most headaches this weekend is David Cameron.

None of this means that there will be a snap general election in the autumn. There will almost certainly not be, but Mr Brown now has the freedom to establish the identity of his own Government and a range of choices for an election next year or in 2009.

By-elections are all about expectations and momentum. The results provide no guide to what will happen at a subsequent general election. By-elections can be judged only in their own terms. Governing parties almost always lose support, as Labour did on Thursday, but the drop in the party’s share of the vote in Ealing of 7.3 points was the smallest of the 18 by-elections in Labour-held seats since 1997, and the 14.1 point drop in Sedgefield was the eighth smallest. So Labour can regard the results with relief, hurdles that have been surmounted, and which, in the past, could have produced embarrassing setbacks.

Labour was helped by the absence of a concentration of votes behind one of the main opposition candidates. Labour survived by dividing its opponents.

The Conservatives never had a realistic chance of winning either seat. Mr Cameron’s mistake was to raise expectations in Ealing Southall by the selection of Tony Lit, who may charitably be described as ideologically rootless. The high-profile Tory push backfired, with a third place and a mere 0.9 point increase in the party’s share of the vote.

Of course, Ealing Southall is not typical of the dozens of marginal seats in southern England where the Tories have been doing well in local elections and aim to win parliamentary seats, but the errors in Ealing raise questions about the judgment of Mr Cameron’s campaign team.

The Liberal Democrats gained in share of votes, and clearly came second in both seats, but at no stage did they look like winning. So after all the fevered speculation about the by-elections being a test of Sir Menzies Campbell’s leadership, he will be relieved at the outcome, and at seeing off the Tories. He lives to fight on, but the Lib Dems have stalled, at a time when, previously, they would have been gaining at the expense of the governing party.

The net result is, as so often with by-elections, to leave the political landscape largely unchanged. Mr Brown’s options remain open, so we will get more speculation and teases. Sir Menzies looks more secure, although his party enemies will no doubt stir doubts at the Lib Dem conference in two months. Mr Cameron is likely to have the roughest summer, under pressure from the party Right and activists, as shown by the fervid debate on the Tory blogging sites such as conservativehome.

As Mr Cameron has discovered, there are few more miserable jobs in British politics than being Leader of the Opposition if your party is not doing well in the polls and winning by-elections.

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