Sports Calendar

Labour poured a big proportion of its financial resources into the London campaign and paid the penalty with losses across the country, including in the North and its Welsh heartlands.

Mr Cameron still hopes that by this evening he will be able to add the London mayoralty to his list of gains. As voting ended last night, strategists in both main parties agreed that the result was close after a higher-than-expected turnout. Polls and the bookmakers suggested that Boris Johnson was on course to end the eight-year reign of Ken Livingstone, but there were signs that the Labour vote had held better than expected.

Mr Brown faces a difficult weekend as Labour MPs weigh up the implications of the results for their chances of holding on to their seats at the next general election. He will start a fightback over the weekend, but his overriding priority will be to convince MPs that he can help Labour to recover for a general election that now looks almost certain to be delayed until 2010.

The most important result of the night came in Bury, in Greater Manchester, where the Tories scored a stunning victory to take control for the first time in 20 years. The win, along with five new Tory councillors in Sunderland, will allow Mr Cameron to claim that he has gained a proper foothold in the North for the first time since becoming leader.

Further south, the other significant victory for the Tories was in Nuneaton and Bedworth, which Labour has controlled for the past 15 years. The seat was one of the key Tory targets, but before last night the Tories only held 14 seats and Labour 20. Mr Cameron will be delighted that the town hall, which covers part of two marginal seats, Nuneaton and North Warwickshire, flipped over to his party. The Tories also unexpectedly took control of Southampton.

The Liberal Democrats faced a mixed bag in terms of results, losing their flagship Liverpool council to no overall control but gaining St Albans, one of their top targets, and retaking Kingston upon Hull. They continue to compete with Labour for second place.

Last night Ed Miliband, the Cabinet Office Secretary and Douglas Alexander, the International Development Secretary, toured the television studios to acknowledge that Labour had made a “mistake” over the 10p rate and that this was having an effect on the polls.

Tessa Jowell, the Olympics Minister who was also in charge of the London campaign, said: “There are a lot of indications that it is going to be tough. It will be not be easy for us.”

Mr Brown has already accepted that mistakes were made over the 10p rate and the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, has promised to bring forward measures to ease the plight of women pensioners and lower-paid workers.

A new poll published as counting began last night reflected the story of Labour decline and Tory advance.

An ICM survey for the BBC Two programme Newsnight found that while 58 per cent of respondents think that Mr Cameron is competent, only 46 per cent say the same about Mr Brown. In a similar poll last year only 49 per cent described the Opposition leader as competent, while 57 per cent felt that way about Mr Brown. Meanwhile, 68 per cent regard Mr Cameron as an asset for the Conservatives; only 24 per cent consider him to be a liability. Just 42 per cent say that Mr Brown is an asset for Labour, while 52 per cent believe that he is a liability.

Only 32 per cent say that Labour can be trusted to run Britain’s economy, down from 48 per cent last year, and well below the reading for any previous year since 2002.

Times Recommends

• Milk: do we need a dairy godmother?
• DIY: the women doing it for themselves
• First double portrait of Princes unveiled