The local elections represented the end of an era. The British tradition has always been that of the late Thursday night/early Friday morning count. This time round, however, not only will the London results not be available until this afternoon at the earliest but many other declarations will be delayed too.

This is partly because the process of validating the much larger number of postal ballots ensures delay but also, bluntly, because it is cheaper for councils to organise a count in normal working hours.

So the BBC special last night was on BBC News, the rebranded News 24, albeit also shown on BBC One, and there was no exit poll conducted for the position of London mayor. A pretty sad development all round.

The Labour Party, though, is rather more concerned about these results being the end of an era in a more direct and collectively painful sense.

Even before the ballot boxes had been opened, ministerial sources had been playing down expectations to the extent that if the party secured only 24 per cent of the projected national vote, lost in excess of 200 seats and saw Ken Livingstone trounced by Boris Johnson this would be an entirely normal mid-term state of affairs.

The implications of the early morning results are, nonetheless, even worse, hinting at a net shift of about 240 seats from Labour, a slightly higher set of gains for the Tories and a net loss for the Liberal Democrats.

What is fair to observe, nevertheless, is that securing an assessment of national sentiment based on this particularly strange set of elections (in which London and Wales are vastly overrepresented) is fiendishly difficult. This means that three crucial sets of caveats have to be kept in mind.

The first is this national-share-of- the-vote business. An awful lot of attention will be placed on whether the Conservatives have won 40 per cent or more of the numbers that the BBC and Sky will reveal at some point today. Now the innocent among you might think that when these figures are released they mean that, say, 41 per cent of all those who voted on Thursday backed a Conservative. If so, I have some shares in Fairyland to sell you.

What happens is that the electoral experts look at a comparatively small number of wards where all three parties are competing this time and have fought each other in the past, compare the performance now with then, and from that extrapolate national percentages.

The second element is that the total number of Labour losses will matter less than where they happen. If Labour loses 200 seats but these are mostly in places where the party is already weak at the local level (basically the South) that would be less bad than if it lost 150 seats but these were concentrated in the North West of England and the West Midlands, whose marginal seats will be vital at the next election.

Finally, there is London. If Mr Livingstone pulls off a third term then this will be interpreted as having “saved the night for Labour”.

Yet the reality is that a Ken win would have come despite the Labour label. It would reflect his enduring capacity to sell himself as a political free spirit and last-minute worries about Mr Johnson. It would tell us little about what a general election in the capital may deliver.

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