Pressure mounts on Brown

In his first electoral test as PM, Mr Brown lost nine councils and 333 seats and saw Labour's Ken Livingstone edged out of power in the capital after eight years.

The Prime Minister is expected to take to the airwaves over the next few days to accept blame for Labour's poor showing and assure voters that he is ready to make good on his promise to "listen and lead".

While a swift Cabinet reshuffle is thought unlikely, Labour MPs left no doubt they believed Mr Brown must move quickly to show he had got a grip on the crisis.

He has less than three weeks to start turning the position around before the May 22 by-election for Gwyneth Dunwoody's old seat of Crewe and Nantwich, which would be vulnerable to the sort of swings seen over the past 24 hours.

Senior Labour figures acknowledged that the party needed to change to pick itself up off the floor after its drubbing, which Cabinet minister Ruth Kelly described as "a terrible result for Labour - worse than anyone in government expected".

Minister for London Tessa Jowell, who ran the Livingstone campaign, said Labour had to "get out of the Westminster village" and re-engage with ordinary people's worries about the impact of economic downturn on their families.

And health minister Ivan Lewis warned: "The danger is after a long period in government, you look like a new elite - you don't look like the voice of the people in Westminster, you look like the voice of Westminster to the people.

"We have got to be the party that speaks to the concerns of hard-working families and relates to their everyday pressures... The message is, not just to Gordon Brown but all of us at Westminster, that we have to shape up."

Labour's 24% projected share of the national vote would cost up to 200 seats if repeated in the general election expected in 2010, and unhappy MPs made clear that the pressure was now on Mr Brown to restore the party's fortunes.