UNITED KINGDOM:BRITAIN'S RULING Labour Party crashed to historic defeats in England, Scotland and Wales yesterday with a derisory 15.8 per cent share of the vote, enabling the British National Party to make its first breakthrough in a national election.
This was the ultimate humiliation for Labour on a night of painful firsts - defeated by the SNP in Scotland and by the Conservatives in Wales - while finding itself squeezed into third place behind the UK Independence Party and just narrowly ahead of the Liberal Democrats.
With Jim Nicholson retaining his seat under the "Ulster Conservatives and Unionists" banner in Northern Ireland, Conservative leader David Cameron declared himself "delighted" with a solid rather than a breakthrough performance in every part of the country. The results put the Tories in pole position with 28.6 per cent of the vote in Britain and 26 of the UK's seats in the new parliament.
Coupled with last week's 37 per cent in the English county council elections, the Conservatives believe they are on course for a general election victory. Polling experts, however, suggested that it was not clear from these figures that Mr Cameron could yet be certain of a swing sufficient to give him an overall Commons majority.
At this writing it remained unclear whether such calculations would play to the advantage or disadvantage of beleaguered prime minister Gordon Brown, as Labour MPs faced the impending moment of decision as to whether they would enjoy any better prospect under a new leader.
Labour's deputy leader, Harriet Harman, admitted that this had been a "dismal" outcome for Labour, acknowledging that the governing party had also been hardest hit by public anger over the Westminster MPs' expenses scandal.
Dismal, however, hardly came close to describing the mood in her party at the realisation that BNP leader Nick Griffin and his colleague Andrew Brons had won seats on Mr Brown's watch.
Dagenham Labour MP Jon Cruddas said the BNP had not really "moved on" in terms of share of the vote since 2004 but benefited rather from the collapse of Labour's vote.
"There's a long-term legacy here of us failing to bring people with us and deal with some of the issues that concern them, be they around housing or about employment insecurity or the recession or immigration," he said.
SNP leader Alex Salmond hailed a "historic" result in Scotland, where the Nationalists beat Labour - 29 per cent to 21 per cent of the vote - for the first time in a nationwide poll.
Welsh Labour also suffered the humiliation of a Tory victory, this the first time the party had failed to come in first since 1922.
Across England, meanwhile, Labour suffered a succession of blows, beaten into fifth place in the South East and South West by the Greens, and in sixth place in Cornwall behind the Cornish Nationalists.