THESE were not a set of local elections for those nervous of statistics. In many ways they have been the most complicated for years. In those parts of England outside of the capital, the appropriate comparison for 2006 was with the 2004 council elections when virtually all these wards were last contested. In London none of the boroughs had been fought over since May 2002.

The difference between these two dates is not just the stuff to thrill the political equivalent of trainspotters (although, to be honest, it surely does). It makes for two wildly diverse elections.

In 2004, Labour had an utterly atrocious evening, falling to third place in the national share of vote and recording easily the worst performance since Tony Blair assumed the Labour leadership in 1994. In 2002, by contrast, the Conservatives under the leadership of Iain Duncan Smith only managed to tie with Labour in London. If the Tories had not done a lot better under David Cameron this time, then it would have been a huge embarrassment to a Notting Hill set that prides itself on being in touch with modern metropolitan society.

If this implies that last night was a game of two halves, that would be a mistaken impression. It was instead a game of three thirds. In the urban north of England, where Labour had feared a "yellow peril", a huge swing to the Liberal Democrats in their traditional heartlands, this largely failed to occur.

The Labour outcome was hardly fantastic — by historic standards it was pretty miserable — yet it was not noticeably worse than in 2004 and may, on detailed inspection, prove to have been a slight improvement. This will be a huge relief to Labour MPs, while astute Lib Dems might begin to wonder whether their strong showing a few years ago was artificially inflated by a backlash against the Iraq war that is disappearing.

The second third constitutes those parts of England that are outside London but rural or suburban. The Conservatives made modest gains here, as much at the expense of the Liberal Democrats as Labour. Once again, Sir Menzies Campbell will have a few reasons to be privately disappointed. It was not rash to hope that a collapse in the remaining Labour vote in these kinds of council would assist his party and harm the Tories. What seems to have happened in practice, though, is a churning effect with some Labour switchers to the Lib Dems but more than offset by other electors switching from the Lib Dems to the Tories.

The third third was London. Labour took a terrible beating in the capital although the decline in its vote was not quite as spectacular as the tumble in the number of seats. The party did notably worse than in the 2002 elections, reinforcing the pattern highlighted in the general election last year. Labour drained votes in every direction - to the Conservatives in two-horses races and the Liberal Democrats, Greens, Respect and the BNP elsewhere.

The one mercy for the party was that it did better against the Lib Dems in boroughs such as Haringey, Islington and Lambeth than the city-wide trend might have hinted at. Nonetheless, the third third was by far the worse third for the Government. If the whole country had behaved like London, overall Labour losses would have topped 425 seats - a defeat that would have imperilled the Prime Minister.

Yet it is not that surprising. The last general election also revealed a game of three thirds. Mr Blair clung on to power because potentially marginal seats in the north of England mostly stayed in his hands, while he lost a significant but tolerable tally of seats in the second third and was battered hardest of all in and around the capital.

It would be staggering if the keystone cops activities of Charles Clarke, the personal life of John Prescott and the apparent hostility of nurses towards Patricia Hewitt, the Health Secretary, had not made a bad situation worse for Labour in the last ten days of the campaign. But the trends that seemed to materialise in a complex series of ballots yesterday were not new nor do they herald a new political era.

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