LONDON: On a sunny Friday in May, by the glittering waters of the Thames, Tony Blair famously declared that a “new dawn” had broken. On Friday, exactly 11 years later, and once again on the banks of the Thames, Labour ushered in what will surely be its new dusk. On May 2, 1997, the venue was a victory party at the Royal Festival Hall. On May 2, 2008, it was a presumed wake at City Hall, waiting for further confirmation of what a day of results had already suggested: that after an era of dominance that has endured since the mid-1990s, Labour is about to enter the twilight.

It threatens to be a slow death, as Labour decays steadily towards defeat in 2010. That, at least, is what plenty in the party fear was foretold by the horror show of a performance in council elections across England and Wales that unfolded from the early hours of Friday morning.

Labour slumped to third place: that seemed oddly tolerable, given that they had managed no better in 2004, going on to win the general election a year later.

But on that occasion Labour had managed at least a 26 per cent share of the vote: this time it was down to a meagre 24 per cent, its worst performance in 40 years. And that wipe-out in 1968 was followed two years later by defeat in a general election. Labourites are struggling to believe the same fate does not await them now.

As Ed Balls, the children, schools and families secretary, admitted to BBC radio on Friday, this could not be dismissed “as simply about a mid-term normal set of problems”.

This was more than the traditional bloody nose administered by a restless electorate halfway through a parliament. That much was clear from the sheer scale of the punch.

Labour did not just trail the Tories, as the opposition Conservatives are also called, as they had done in previous council contests. They were 20 points behind. The Tories did not just clear the 40 per cent threshold, they hurdled over it to score 44 per cent, just three points behind the high watermark reached by Tony Blair in local elections in 1995, when New Labour were two years away from a landslide victory.

But this was about more than numbers. Even before the London mayoral result was in, the Conservatives won precisely where they needed to win, toppling Labour in several of its few remaining southern bastions — Southampton brought an unexpected Tory victory — and making inroads in the north. In the nearly three years since David Cameron took over as Conservative leader, one of his most visible weaknesses had been his inability to break through in the north of England. Perhaps it was the toff factor (he went to Eton), perhaps it was stubborn distrust of the Tory brand that refused to melt away. But on Friday the Tories took over in bellwether Bury — a northern town with an uncanny knack for picking winners — and in North Tyneside as well as making gains in Sunderland and Birmingham. This was the week Cameron broke out of his southern comfort zone.

Why is this happening? Some will say that if Labour does find itself in the same position as John Major’s Tories circa 1995, that is not entirely its own fault. There is a pendulum effect in politics and in multiparty democracies governments do eventually lose their grip on power. If that is happening now, in the third term, it is hardly unusual: losing a fourth election is the norm.

It didn’t work out that way for Major partly because he was up against an opposition still not deemed credible by the electorate. On Friday, the Tories cleared that hurdle, too: no one in British politics would now describe Cameron or his party as unelectable.

What’s more, these are economic hard times. No matter how angry voters were with Blair four years ago, most felt good in their wallets — good enough to re-elect him in 2005. Brown does not have that cushion now.

And something else is at work, too. Friday’s numbers suggest many, many of those Labour would think of as its core voters abandoned the party. Angry at the abolition of the 10p income tax rate which hit some of the poorest, too many were ready to stay home or even break the habit of a lifetime and vote Conservative. One phone-in show on Friday had ex-Labour supporters queuing up to denounce their party — and its leader — for no longer seeming to know what they are for. And if the next two years threaten to be a slow, painful process on Friday night in London provided a foretaste. Instead of the short, sharp shock of election nights of old, Ken Livingstone had to suffer 24 agonising hours, watching as the TV monitors in City Hall showed the votes gradually piling up against him. Just one glimpse of the turnout figures was doubtless all he needed to know that the job he loved was slipping away: record surges in London’s traditionally Conservative-voting outer boroughs - Bexley and Bromley, Croydon and Sutton - hitting the 49 per cent mark. Lower figures, 43 per cent downward, in the boroughs he needed to win, including his old stamping grounds of Brent and Lambeth.

Aides to the mayor had been preparing for defeat, consoling themselves in the final days that they had done all they could and that they had “won the argument” against Boris Johnson — always crumbs of consolation for those who know they’re about to lose.

The message was clear enough: it was the revenge of the suburbs, as outer London took on the heart of the metropolis and won. They had long suspected Livingstone was the “zone 1 mayor” in reference to public transport’s central London area, and, in Johnson, they at last found a champion with a chance to win. It was the same pattern that had inflicted such damage on Labour nationally, the suburban “Blair Conservatives” coming back home. As the London School of Economics’ Tony Travers put it: “Suburban Britain is falling back in love with the Conservative party — and that’s a measure of the end of Blairism.”

For London, it seemed to herald the end of one of the most remarkable careers in British politics — as Ken Livingstone, the man who defied Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, finally succumbed to political mortality.

He was the last remaining representative of a brand of leftism that loomed large in the 1970s and is now all but extinct, within the upper reaches of Labour at least.

Now London is about to embark on a different kind of experiment, having apparently anointed Boris Johnson as the most powerful Conservative in Britain. As dusk falls on one era, a new dawn begins. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service