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Well, well, well. Labour wins in Norwich. Yes, I did say Labour and win in the same sentence. And no-one looked more surprised than they did.

At the beginning of the evening a downcast Labour were warning that if you had to lose an election, this was the one to lose. It would certainly save coping with the next round of cuts and the fallout from the Connaught collapse.

The Greens did well but not well enough. They never were going to take control - at best they might have become the largest party and they needed two seats to do it. In the event, the Greens held what they'd got and made one crucial gain.

But so did Labour. So the maths stays the same and the Greens remain two seats short.

Conservative bonhomie was punctured as Anthony Little, who polled respectably in the parliamentary elections earlier this year, lost his seat to Labour.

The Lib Dems had a bad night. Although they retained Eaton, they lost Thorpe Hamlet to the Greens and their share of the vote fell in nearly every seat.

It speaks volumes that they took comfort from moving up from fouth to second in one seat.

And they were adamant that being in the coalition was not a factor (despite it being only four months since their candidate unseated former Labour Home Secretary Charles Clarke).

Labour smiles began to appear as they fought off a Green challenge in University and Sewell wards. That set the scene for a night of surprise and delight among the Laboour ranks.

"It's too early in the political cycle to be winning like this," chortled Labour MEP, Richard Howitt, who had dutifully turned out to support the troops.

This is a council that has had 70 years of Labour rule, only interrupted twice, so a move towards them, albeit a fairly modest one, should not be such a shock.

The question is whether it's the beginning of something bigger.

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