You’re a f***ing disgrace. You’ve set this town back 30 years. You’ve made this town a laughing stock.” These are the early hours of May 3, 2002, in a Hartlepool leisure centre, and Peter Mandelson is telling a young man called Stuart Drummond exactly what he thinks of him. Not that Hartlepudlians know him as Stuart Drummond. As far as they know, their MP is remonstrating with a man-sized monkey called H’Angus. They know him from Victoria Park, the town’s football ground, and they like him so much they’ve just made him mayor.

Mandelson’s heirs will get used to nights of frustration like this. If the polls are right, Labour candidates will win none of the new mayoralties across England. Instead we can expect Reform, the Greens and perhaps even the Tories to take power in Hull, Greater Lincolnshire, the West of England and Cambridgeshire. Labour might win one, if they are lucky. And in time it could — will? — get worse.

• Local election results: follow liveYou’d think they would have learnt from the monkey. Directly elected mayors were one of New Labour’s great constitutional innovations. Tony Blair thought they might sprinkle a little stardust on dreary town halls and revive interest in local government. It worked, but not in the way he hoped. Many voters didn’t want them. They didn’t want his regional assembly in the north-east either, a proposition rejected after a referendum campaign run by a thirtysomething Dominic Cummings with the help of an inflatable white elephant.Where voters did elect mayors, they didn’t vote Labour. Blair hoped Sir Richard Branson would be his candidate in London but got Ken Livingstone as an independent instead. In Stoke-on-Trent they snubbed Labour for the manager of a Citizens’ Advice Bureau. Middlesbrough elected a former police inspector known as Robocop, North Tyneside a Tory. Doncaster once had an English Democrat. Mansfield and Copeland — places the proverbial donkey in a red rosette once won elections — would later opt for independents too.We could go on. In fact, we will go on, and well beyond this weekend. Unlike Blair, a reluctant convert, Sir Keir Starmer is an evangelist for devolution. We should expect nothing less from a prime minister whose one unwavering conviction is his disdain for SW1. “If we want to challenge the hoarding of potential in our economy,” he said in 2022, “we must win the war against the hoarders in Westminster. Give power back and put communities in control.”Constitutional reform looks neat and tidy in a seminar room but its advocates often find themselves pulling an unholy mess from the ballot box. George Robertson discovered the Scottish parliament could not “kill nationalism stone dead” when voters elected an SNP government in 2007. Welsh Labour’s new electoral system has rolled out a red carpet for Reform in Cardiff Bay.The regional combined authorities up for election this week were the brainchild of George Osborne but Starmer will soon go further. I’m told that before the summer recess, Angela Rayner will bring forward the English Devolution Bill. It will abolish scores of councils (hence the cancellation of several elections that would have happened on Thursday), merge others into larger, unitary authorities (which will save the Treaury money), and give every region of England its own elected mayor. This, for once, is something the prime minister really believes in, so it is unfortunate so many of his MPs hate it.What’s not to like? The answer is that active ingredient occasionally absent from Labour’s recipes for good government: raw politics. To take some of the criticisms heard by ministers in turn: if you are a Labour MP in Crawley, or somewhere in Staffordshire, the legislation replaces your local borough council (winnable by Labour in a good year) with a big, county-wide authority (which probably isn’t). If you are a Labour MP in Kent, you can expect a Tory or Reform mayor looming from the bully pulpit. And if you are a Labour MP in Cornwall, you’ll be lumbered with a mayor the locals didn’t want in the first place.These mayoralties mean difficult elections for Labour. True, Osborne didn’t let the prospect of a life presidency for Andy Burnham deter him from establishing a Greater Manchester combined authority. He thought it was the right thing to do for the north and an imbalanced national economy. Labour’s new map of England, however, poses political danger everywhere.Ministers fear that everyone will reap the benefit but them. “The risk,” says one who has lost count of the complaints they have heard from colleagues, “is that we spend so much time reorganising that we can’t collect the bins.” Hollie Ridley, Labour’s general secretary, has privately argued that the new authorities risk hollowing out local Labour parties in places like Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire and Sussex. Downing Street advisers prefer to speak of the galvanising effect of opposition. “Who can Labour councillors blame if everything’s terrible and there’s only a Labour government above them? It does no harm to have people exposed — and Reform mayors will be.”• Local election results: follow liveNigel Farage, however, is still licking his lips. No politician has enjoyed Labour’s constitutional adventurism like the godfather of the populist right. It was Blair’s decision to introduce proportional representation for European elections, don’t forget, which sent Farage to Brussels in 1999 and made Ukip a national force in the elections that followed. He sees the new mayoralties as the perfect laboratory for performance politics. “Labour select local councillors,” he told me earlier this week, with the Olympic boxer Luke Campbell poised to become Reform’s mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire. “We select gold medal winners.”Just as Starmer’s ministers are learning to exploit their landslide majority, he is giving power away — all while promising to fill the potholes that will soon be someone else’s responsibility. Progressive reformers always thought centralisation was Labour’s congenital defect, but the icons of its history thought it precisely the point: recall the elderly Peter Shore, fading in the Lords, arguing against independence for the Bank of England.You hear the same from today’s ministers, anxious to get things done. They ask whether the Treasury’s drive for deregulation can survive contact with Green mayors, and point out that No 10 is preaching devolution while exerting tight control over new council funding for those potholes. One fumes: “People don’t give a f*** whether something’s devolved or not. They just want their streets to be safe and their hospitals to be clean.” Says another: “It’s municipal socialism versus the big state.” Starmer and Rayner have chosen their side. It might mean less socialism than they expect.