So said the BBC News website first thing this morning.

I’m become very used to writing “Oh my days, how awful” posts after local elections. This morning, the picture is much more positive.

We’ve ended the night, with two thirds of results in, on +41 councillors which compares to 31 for Labour and 3 for the Tories.

We’ve retained control in places like Cheltenham, Eastleigh and, after a few wobbles, Sutton.

We gained Richmond on Thames pretty handsomely. I was being told in the run-up to the election that it was on a knife edge. We ended up gaining …

Just a quick update of where we are at 2am. We are currently on +14 seats and generally doing a little better than expected.

Every English local election night since the formation of the Coalition has been an absolute nightmare to sit through. Tonight is much more pleasant.

John Curtice says that we are having our best night at local elections since the formation of the coalition.

We look like we might gain Richmond, though it’s going to be close.

We’ll take a bit of a hit in Sutton and party sources are less sure than they were earlier that …

Well, there’s nothing more we can do. The polls have closed. Knackered candidates and their teams who have been up since dawn now head to their counts. A massive thanks to everyone who has been involved in the campaigns – the literature writers, data whizzes, organisers, deliverers, canvassers, candidates, poster people, agents, people who keep the Lib Dem army marching on its stomach, people who allow their homes to be used as temporary HQ

We know that this isn’t going to be a massively brilliant night for us. This one in the electoral cycle has been historically brutal. The best we’ve done in the last 20 years is a net gain of 43 seats and we have to go back to 2002 when Charles Kennedy was leader to find that.

Let’s look in more detail.

In 1990. when we were pretty low in the polls, we lost 78 seats

Our best night ever came in 1994, a pretty good year for us after we’d won a fair few seats off the Tories, we gained a whopping 428 councillors

In 1998 we lost 7 seats

In 2002, we gained 43 seats

In 2006, bearing in mind we were at the height of our powers post Iraq and had won the Dunfermline by-election a few months previously, we had the massive net gain of 2 seats. 

In 2010, bearing in mind we did not so badly in the General Election that day (not brilliantly, but not badly), we lost 132 councillors.

2014 was an absolute horlicks. I went back and read the posts I’d written at the time and they made me want to cry as I remembered how bruised and battered we all felt then. We lost 310 fantastic councillors.