For the Tories, it seemed like a decent night's work. The party was flat on the floor in 2001. On Thursday it picked itself up and started to fight. Michael Howard will be credited for taking the first step towards a Tory revival.
For some Conservative modernizers, that will count as a disappointment -- not that they would dare say such a thing out loud.
For they needed the party either to win or be conclusively defeated, so that they might begin the wholesale transformation that Labour underwent in the 1990s. Now, the modernizers fear, Tories will think they need do no more than give one more heave next time. Worse, Conservatives may conclude that playing to Britons' demons, rather than their better angels, is what pays dividends.
Liberal Democrats found it hard to know what kind of night they were having. Even at 2:30am Friday morning, no national picture was emerging. Some gains here, as in Birmingham Yardley, but losses there, as in Newbury. It was spotty and patchy.
Still, the larger point was that in the election of 2005, they were finally on the map. In the last week of the campaign, they became the chief objects of Labour fire. This is a mark of their achievement, the arrival, perhaps, of three-party politics. This represents a real change in the British landscape. The Lib Dems are no longer on the margins, dismissed as an irritant by the other parties -- but now a real player that can turn elections.
So what is the outcome? When Blair spoke to the people of Sedgefield, looking pained and drawn rather than elated, he said Britons had wanted a Labour government with a reduced majority. Most pundits had said that outcome was impossible to achieve; the vote was too blunt an instrument to effect so calibrated a consequence.
And yet that is what seems to have happened. Now there will be a House of Commons with more Lib Dems, a couple more independents and, yes, more Conservatives. The house of poodles, the rubber stamp, is gone.
That might have a taming effect on Labour. Now the party will simply not have the votes to drive through another tuition fees, another ID cards, another Iraq. The Labour rebels will have the power of veto.
But it may also be good for parliamentary democracy itself. After years dismissed as a pliant echo chamber for the government, the House of Commons will suddenly matter. The people of Britain spoke -- and they may have got exactly what they wanted.
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