The Labour Party knew Tony Blair had to go when he became an electoral liability.

Less than a year into the job, where does Gordon Brown stand in terms of this all-important marker?

Well, don’t expect any answers from Labour’s candidate in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election.

Tamsin Dunwoody refused to come up with a straight answer in when she was asked the question repeatedly by a reporter. You can see the interview in the You Tube clip below.

“Gordon Brown is our prime minister” and a number of variations on that theme was her reply.

The Conservatives, whose leader David Cameron is back on the campaign trail in Crewe and Nantwich on Thursday, are gleefully circulating the clip of her interview, complete with an awkward-looking John Denham (minister for universities and skills) standing by.

Brown has been noticeably absent from the northern constituency in the run-up to next week’s by-election, which opinion polls show his party could lose to the Tories, despite it being regarded as a safe Labour seat.

(Updated on May 3 with new headline, election results, reaction and photos)

**For full coverage of the elections go to our special page**

The man described by some as a joke, by others as a brilliant mind has ended Ken Livingstone’s eight-year reign at City Hall.

The verdict is still out on what exactly Boris Johnson’s victory means for the Conservative Party overall but his performance as mayor could help determine whether people will vote for the Tories in a general election next time.

Johnson, whose experience of running big projects is limited, will lead one of the world’s most high-profile cities with an 11.3 billion pound budget to run public transport, police and fire services and promote the economy of this global financial centre.

The Labour Party may be hoping that the gaffe-prone “blond bombshell” will prove incapable of doing the job and thus damage the Conservatives chances of winning the next election. Johnson will have to get cracking soon with strong policies to bolster his image and become the ambassador that the Tories need him to be as the capital’s mayor.

Johnson paid generous tribute to Livingstone in his victory speech, describing him as “a very considerable public servant” and acknowledging that many who had voted for him had been wavering when it came to casting their votes.

“You shaped the office of mayor. You gave it national prominence and when London was attacked on 7 July 2005 you spoke for London,” Johnson said after he was declared winner in what had turned out to be a marathon vote count lasting well over 12 hours, partly due to a record turnout of 45 percent.

Livingstone in return offered to help Johnson and said that the responsibility for his defeat lay with him and him alone.

The Conservative candidate won with 1,168,738 first and second preference votes, compared with Livingstone’s 1,028,966.

Source: London Elects

The Johnson victory in London has added to Conservative delight at pushing Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Labour Party to its worst performance on record in local elections elsewhere in England and Wales.

Senior Conservative sources said they would be “gobsmacked” if Johnson did not win the mayoral contest, the Daily Telegraph said.

Even Minister for London Tessa Jowell conceded as we waited for the final result: “You’re absolutely right that it looks, at the moment, as if Boris Johnson is ahead,” she told the BBC.

Confidence of a Tory win was boosted after one bookmaker announced it was paying out on a Boris Johnson victory hours before the official result is expected later this evening.

Opinion polls had put Livingstone and Johnson neck-and-neck, with LibDem candidate Brian Paddick a distant third.

Labour has lost at least 200 seats in the local elections in England and Wales — leaving it in its worst position since the days of Harold Wilson — and even before the results of the London mayoral contest are known, some political analysts are saying Gordon Brown will lose the next general election unless the economy improves.

But others say this was a vote against Labour rather than a vote for the Conservatives and that governments, especially those that have been in power for as long as Labour, always take a knock in local elections. Look at Tony Blair in 2004 just a year before he swept home again.

The next general election doesn’t have to be called until 2010 and even a week is a long time in politics, they point out.

Do you think the writing is on the wall for Brown, or can Labour win a fourth term in the next general election?

**Full coverage of the London mayor and local elections **

The election results for England and Wales at 8:00 p.m. with all 159 councils having officially declared.

Source: BBC

Hearing Gordon Brown say he’d made mistakes yesterday almost made me jump. Could the Great Clunking Fist really be admitting he’d got something wrong?

I’ve been covering Brown for more than ten years — both at the Treasury and now at No 10. And in all the interviews, international trips and news conferences I have never heard him say sorry.

He’ll usually quotes a blizzard of figures or just repeat what he said, just more emphatically. He certainly would never concede anyone else could be right.

That was much the case when the whole row over the 10 pence tax row started. Brown wouldn’t accept that his abolition of the lowest tax rate could hit millions of poor people.

Fairly or unfairly he maintained that people losing out from scrapping the 10p rate would benefit from other allowances or tax credits. People would come to understand this was a major tax reform — he also cut the basic rate of tax to 20 pence from 22 pence in the pound. Nor were there too many rebels in his own Labour Party.

That changed last week though when nearly 50 Labour MPs looked ready to vote against the government. The Treasury quickly said it would make some concessions in the form of handouts to anyone losing out.

And then on Wednesday, Brown admitted he had made not just one, but two mistakes. He had not thought about the low-paid who didn’t get a tax credit and there was no help for some of the elderly who don’t get pensioners’ tax allowances.

This appears to be the new listening Gordon. His new strategists — former PR guru Stephen Carter and ad man David Muir — must be telling him he has to emote more.

Labour is taking a pounding in the polls and his own personal ratings have dropped sharply over the last six months.

We saw a bit of this a couple of weeks ago. Instead of crying his usual refrain that no country can insulate itself from the ups and downs of the global economy, Brown said he understood people’s concerns, their worries about their well-being.

On top of that, Brown is probably genuinely wounded by people thinking he was robbing the poor to pay the middle classes. One of his lasting legacies running the Treasury for a decade has been a more redistributive focus to tax policy.

He does care about helping the poor, he is never more passionate than when talking about ending poverty in Africa.

The problem is that he doesn’t do touchy-feely very well. Perhaps the great irony is that Conservative leader David Cameron — a child of privilege, educated at Eton and Oxford — does the bloke-next-door so much better than Brown, son of a stern Scottish clergyman.

Cameron often peppers his conversation with everyday slang and talks about “stuff”. Brown finds it hard to stop himself from talking about economic stability, fiscal rectitude and the long-term challenges facing Britain.

Brown may think he is building a better, fairer Britain. He needs to say it better.

Like Labour’s in Birmingham a fortnight ago, the overall tone of the Conservative Party Spring conference in Gateshead this weekend has been pretty low-key.

Tory strategists say they are not expecting an election until 2010 — they argue that Gordon Brown might want an 2009 contest but will be constrained by a deficit in the polls and an economy that in all likelihood will still be reeling from the global credit crunch.

So there’s been little in the way of substantive new policies this weekend.

Better to keep their powder dry until an election looks closer on the horizon.

Party leader David Cameron instead put the focus of the conference on casting the Conservatives as the party of the family.

“We’re doing very well with older people, but we need to win over the 30 to 40-somethings,” one shadow Cabinet member told me at the futuristic Sage Gateshead conference centre.

He predicted 2008 would be a year of consolidation for the Tories rather than containing any new dramatic turns.

Both main parties would have to see how the ongoing turmoil in financial markets hits the real economy.

Labour also appears to be shying away from any big ideas for now.

Chancellor Alistair Darling’s budget this week was widely derided as boring, though he would argue that stability is key at a time when the economy is being buffeted by a global storm.

The Conservatives say Darling was boring because he didn’t have any money to play with.

But they’ve not really said what they would do themselves, beyond a vague, long-term commitment to tax cuts.

With the polls volatile, both parties are now scrapping for the same centre-ground with micro-measures targeted at particular groups.

It will take some bold ideas before either can pull away and be certain of victory at the next election.

You can see what Shadow Chancellor George Osborne had to tell my colleague Tim Castle about possible tax cuts under a future Tory government here and the Northern Rock rescue here .