Eyes down for the next two years

So we are waking up this morning to the news that Boris has triumphed over Ken with a majority of 140,000 votes on second preference.

It caps a bad end to a bad day for the Labour party and the papers and the commentators this morning are revelling in it.All the papers feature the doom laden headlines of massacre,bloodbath,meltdown.

I had to laugh at the Express whose front page says of Brown,

He is the biggest disaster ever and now even failed asylum seekers queue to leave Britain

We can be in no doubt that barring a coup de dat in the party ,of which we will no doubt here more rumours of over the weekend,Labour has two years now to convince the country that it can govern into the second decade.

And the Tories have two years to show that they have some credible policies with which to get elected and are not simply living off Labour's disasters.

Here are just some of the comments this morning.Simon Heffer in the Telegraph who says that

The only comfort Labour can take is that the turnout was so abysmal - 35 per cent, and in some of its heartlands barely in double figures. Many of its voters are sitting at home rather than transferring an allegiance: for the moment, at least.

but in the two years for him the solution may well be that

many MP's will conclude that those aims ( of the Labour Party)would be better achieved without the charisma, decisiveness and genius of Gordon Brown.

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian says that

Eleven years after it promised a new dawn, Labour's dusk has arrived

and adds

On May 2 2008 it was a wake at City Hall, witnessing a defeat that seemed to confirm 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 after a horror show of a performance in local elections across England and Wales.

The Independent's leader says

Mr Brown faces an uphill struggle as he surveys this new landscape

and

from traditional Labour heartlands, where the decline in the vote was as sharp as anywhere, the message was that something rather more substantial and immediate would be needed if Mr Brown was to revive the party's fortunes in time for the next general election.

And Steve Richards in the same paper says

More worrying for Labour is that there is no obvious way forward to rebuild an election-winning coalition of support. Listen to the banalities from ministers and you can see how they are struggling to cope with the tide that is sweeping over them. "We will listen and lead" is the most common mantra and one that leads nowhere at all.

Matthew Parris in the Times gives some advice to Labour MP's

give up,Bayonet for the wounded: there's no constructive message in the voters' rejection of Brown

The Sun offers a bit more hope

IT wasn’t so much a punch on the nose. More a complete pasting.
Britain’s verdict on Gordon Brown’s Government leaves Labour on the ropes.
But although down, they are not out.

It is time to regroup, Mr Brown

says the Mirror adding

Certainly it was a good night for the Tories, but behind their triumphant smiles is the knowledge that many core Labour voters stayed away from the polls. And the growing feeling that while Mr Brown is not communicating his vision, David Cameron does not have any vision at all.