Many happy returns (but not as happy as Blair had hoped)

"You've stolen my opening line," moaned his agent, John Burton, beside him.

It was all in good humour. The Prime Minister - who was born at ten minutes past six in an Edinburgh maternity home 52 years ago - beamed the grin that the Tories had wanted to wipe from his face.

Very good humour. "D'you know this really is history," said Peter Brookes, one of the "famous five" who had been watching football at Mr Burton's house in Trimdon Village in 1983 when a young, aspiring candidate called Blair had knocked on the door and asked for their support.

"Other than Mrs Thatcher, the last Prime Minister to win three consecutive terms was Lord Palmerston in the 1850s. And the Labour Party has never done it! You can't get more historic than that - and it started here."

But just two hours earlier the club had been in a very different humour. There were long faces, puffed out cheeks and nibbled finger-ends even before midnight when Putney was lost, amid stony - almost devastated - silence in the hall.

The Labour vote there plummeted nine per cent - a repeat across the country would have been disastrous.

Instead of cheering Labour victories, they were reduced to whispering "yes, yes" when the Liberal Democrats narrowly failed to overtake Jim Cousins' 11,000 majority in Newcastle.

A mile or so down the road, Mr Blair was in his house, Myrobella, apparently transfixed by the television.

A group of loyalists was despatched from the club "to gee him up, to encourage him", but even when he arrived at his count at Aycliffe Leisure Centre at 1.27am, he still wore the dazed expression of a man who fears the ground is about to open up beneath his next footstep.

Yet in the club, the mood was changing. Jack Straw comfortably held Blackburn at 1.15am, and at 1.40am came Birmingham Edgbaston. In 1997, the Edgbaston result had been declared at just gone midnight. Labour had overturned 50 years of Tory dominance in the seat, launching the landslide - the covers band playing that night were drowned off by the raucous celebration, never to return.

Now Edgbaston declared that Labour's majority had been halved - but the seat was still theirs. Tony was going to survive...

And in Sedgefield he had survived with an increased majority. It was announced at 2.20am, that rather than Reg Keys denting Mr Blair's majority, he had helped increase it to 18,449.

"That's massive," said a female member of the faithful, almost in awe.

The news from the City of Durham nine minutes later was greeted with a football cheer - and the celebrations continued until Mr Blair's arrival.

"It's a great victory in this constituency because, despite the rubbish and the venom thrown at us by the media and some of the candidates, we have increased our majority," said Mr Burton, almost in disbelief. "We have increased our majority."

Mr Blair was back - bruised, but the beam on full. ''To be elected once can be difficult, as we found," he said. "To be elected twice is something, in consecutive terms of office, this party never knew before. To be re-elected for a third term is very special.

''And it actually began here in Sedgefield, here where we learnt that we had to reconnect with the lives of people, here where we learnt that our values were fantastic and were the values of the British people - but we had to learn how to apply them in the modern world."

At the end of his speech, he was mobbed - "Haway Tony, give some of this winning to the Toon - we could do with it," said one man enthusiastically pumping his hand - before Mr Blair was whisked away to the airport.

It left Mr Burton, whisky in hand, amid the 4am debris of a rollercoaster ride to a third term.

"No, I'm not flying down with him - last time, I ended up singing on a bus with Mick Hucknall," said the agent.

Dawn was breaking in the Sedgefield sky, a beautiful translucent blue - although on the horizon there were one or two grey clouds.