A number of political careers appear to have been damaged by the attempt to create a mayor for Birmingham, which was rejected overwhelmingly by voters in a referendum earlier this month.

Sion Simon quit his career in the House of Commons in order first to campaign for the creation of a mayor and secondly to campaign to win the job for himself.

His Erdington seat, which he vacated to make way for current MP Jack Dromey, is a Tory target and Mr Dromey faces a real fight to hold on to it if boundary changes proposed by the Electoral Commission go through.

But there’s little doubt that Mr Simon would still be the MP today, with a secure future at least until 2015, if he had chosen to stay on.

Instead, he took a gamble which might have paid off handsomely. Mr Simon could have gone down in the history as Birmingham’s first directly-elected mayor and the man who kicked off a new era of local government.

As it stands, he is considering his future. There’s no reason his career in politics should be over, but it’s hard to see where it goes from here, unless he can convince the Labour party to find him another seat in the Commons.

Rival potential candidate Liam Byrne remained the Member of Parliament for Birmingham Hodge Hill and kept his seat in the Shadow Cabinet.

If the city had voted to create a mayor then Mr Byrne would have left the Labour front bench. But as that didn’t happen there was no reason he couldn’t simply return to the fold, greeted by colleagues delighted to have him back.

That was the theory. In practice, there’s no escaping the fact that Mr Byrne effectively said he was ready to leave his Westminster friends behind and do something else, if the chance arose.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but one or two Labour figures at Westminster apparently seized the opportunity to get revenge on a colleague who sometimes espouses worrying “right-wing” or “Blairite” views, such as the idea that the welfare system should offer more help to people who have contributed to society, or that Labour must have more to say about public services than simply promising to spend more money.

Hence, Mr Byrne has lost his role as head of Labour’s policy review, although he remains in the shadow cabinet. The move was treated with glee by Labour activists who care more about ideological purity than winning elections and, indeed, by David Cameron.

Then we come to Gisela Stuart, another Labour mayoral hopeful, who will carry on as MP for Edgbaston.

If she stands for re-election, either in Edgbaston or in the new Harborne constituency likely to be created by boundary reviews, she will face charges – unfair as they may be – that she was ready to abandon her constituents to pursue other goals.

Rarely in politics has there been a tale of more woe than the battle to create a mayor of Birmingham and the MPs who hoped to wear the chains of office.