Wow

Ok, I'll put my hand up and say I got it wrong. The Tories didn't just beat Labour, they destroyed them.
The Conservatives overturned a Labour majority of 5,500, and turned it into a Conservative majority of 7000, with a swing of 16.5%. For those who are curious, a swing of 16.5%, if uniform across the country, would deliver the Conservatives a crushing victory in a General Election, with a majority of 218! In other news, UKIP drove the Greens into fifth place and put extreme pressure on the Lib Dems for 3rd place.

Although the turnout was down a long way (down from 61% at the 2005 General Election to 42% yesterday), I think David Cameron and the Conservative Party will be absolutely thrilled with the result. The majority is large enough that the Conservatives could expect to hold the seat at a General Election even if some of those Labour voters who stayed home today come out on polling day (although with a seat like Norwich North the Tories should never ever be complacent about the difficulty of winning).

So, the run-down:
Parties who will be happy-
Conservatives - Obviously, their candidate won with an enormous swing, and looks set to hold the seat at the next election (excluding some major game-changer that reignites Labour's chances). The turnout, while down, was still good for a by-election, and the Tories certainly didn't suffer as much as the other main parties from 'a plague on all your houses' mentality from voters over the expenses scandal.

UKIP - UKIP will be feeling pretty good, I should think. They pushed the Greens into fifth, and showed a good chance of beating the Liberals Democrats into third. What is particularly interesting is that the UKIP vote increased even as the Tories won the seat. Since UKIP (as a rule) takes votes from the Conservatives, the interesting question is whether UKIP has started stealing Labour and Lib Dem votes as well as Conservative, or whether the underlying 'right-wing' majority is even larger than the result indicates.

Parties who will be unhappy- Everyone else...
Ok, seriously. Labour - Obviously. A safe seat has fallen to the Conservatives (by the way, the last time this seat fell to the Tories was in the great Thatcher landslide of 1983), Gordon Brown's response to the expenses scandal has been shown to be a grave error (indications show that many Labour voters stayed home because of their anger over how Dr Ian Gibson, the former MP, had been treated) and Labour's share of the vote has plummeted. I see already that in the Evening Standard Labour MP's are talking about an autumn leadership challenge if he doesn't shape up (yeah right, I'll believe it when I see it!)

Liberal Democrats - They will try to spin it as a turn against all the main parties, but the Lib Dems got hammered, no two ways about it. Their vote total and share of the vote both went down from 2005. The fact they are not picking up seemingly any disenchanted Labour voters in urban seats such as Norwich North will be of deep concern to them.

Greens - The Greens will be a little disappointed in the result. Sure, they are a small party, and no-one expected too much of them, but being pushed into fifth place will hurt. Not least because they are the second largest party on the Norwich City Council, and so might have expected some of that support to move into a Westminster election.