History was in-the-making in Britain this morning, with Scotland seemingly poised for coalition government and a shock for Labour - its expected majority in the Welsh Assembly resting on a knife-edge.
A jubilant Mr Tom McCabe secured his own place in the history books just after midnight, winning Hamilton South for Labour, and becoming the first elected member of a Scottish parliament in 300 years. However the Hamilton result also fuelled expectations of a swing to the Scottish National Party.
The BBC's election night poll gave the SNP 30 per cent of the votes cast in Scotland yesterday, projecting that the party would have between 41 and 47 seats in Holyrood - almost certainly enough to secure Mr Alex Salmond against any threat to his leadership from his party's `fundamentalist' wing.
But while the BBC's projected seat allocations allowed for a margin of error of up to six, on its best assessment Labour seemed set to fall between four to nine seats short of an overall majority in Scotland.
The Tories, with an estimated 13 per cent of the vote were projected to have 11/17 seats, to 10/16 for the Liberal Democrats with 11 per cent of the votes cast.
If sustained by the actual results, that would point to early negotiations between Mr Donald Dewar, Labour's choice for First Minister, and Mr Jim Wallace about the possibility of a Lab/Lib Dem pact.
However, Mr Charles Kennedy MP, a likely successor to Mr Paddy Ashdown, insisted that coalition was not the necessary or inevitable outcome. He suggested that a minority administration, forced to "work with the grain" of the new parliament on individual issues, could be a healthy democratic outcome.
In London, meanwhile, the mood at Conservative Central Office lifted amid expectations of net gains of some 1,200 seats in the council elections, with the BBC suggesting Conservatives taking 33 per cent of the vote. However, even on very early returns, Labour and most professional pundits immediately mocked a claim by the Conservative Party chairman, Mr Michael Ancram, that they were making "a significant advance."
Any Tory `revival' has to be viewed in the context of an astonishingly low turnout yesterday (possibly around 29 per cent), and, more importantly still, in the context of the party's worst ever performance in the same round of elections in 1995 when it lost 2000 council seats and took just 25 per cent of the vote.
The leader of the Commons, Mrs Margaret Becket, said that, with Labour apparently in the lead with 35 per cent of the vote, the results were "without precedent" for a government at mid-term. And to Mr Ancram's claim that the Conservatives had moved forward, polling expert Professor Anthony King retorted, "snails move forward as well", noting a projected swing to the Conservatives nowhere near the range necessary to spell a serious threat to a Labour victory at the next general election.
With counting in Wales due to start at 9 a.m. this morning, there were unconfirmed reports that the turnout could be much lower than expected. That spelt a double headache for Labour party chiefs - both in terms of the prestige of the new Assembly itself, and the party's expectations of winning overall control. However, the peculiarities of the voting system could result in the irony that a disappointing Labour result could increase the chances of Secretary of State Alun Michael winning a seat in the Assembly and becoming First Secretary.