If it is a matter of faith with you that Gordon Brown is mad, terminally dithering, responsible for all the ills you suffer while entirely innocent of all the benefits you enjoy, sub-Stalinesque, constitutionally unable to empathise with your plight (whatever that consists of) and utterly incompetent, it may be better if you move straight on to the column below. Because my argument is almost premised on the idea that this weird consensus is no better grounded than was the perception, current last July - do you remember last July? - that he walked on water.

As a young and very vulgar Marxist I tried to get to grips with the prophet's notion of base and superstructure. As I understood it, economic conditions would determine political and social movements. Taking modern Britain, for all that any country is beset by problems (lost discs, bingers, drug takers or Scottish Nationalists), the underlying facts were - are - that mortgages had become cheapo, unemployment was low, crime was, in general, falling, the economy was performing better than in most other similar countries and there were huge infrastructural improvements, as evidenced in new school buildings and hospitals. So one might expect that the unspectacular Mr Brown, even if not loved and occasionally maladroit, should be at least be moderately respected.

Of course, there is a deal of nervousness around. All this talk of negative equity is alarming, as are recent increases in the cost of oil and food. But even as the furore has developed about the fate of the losers from the abolition of the 10ptax band, there has been almost no notice taken at all of the winners from the impending cut in the basic rate. It isn't true that, under Mr Brown, the poor have got poorer, but it is the case that the very rich are very much richer. We have not yet devised a system that cuts them down to size without jeopardising wealth creation.

But the facts that constitute the “base” seem to mean little. Different groups in society compete with each other for status as Brown's victims. This leaves a lag between the story that is being told and the underlying reality - a lag that really ought to be filled by those people that wish the Government well. Then at least there could be an argument.

Fat chance. You get a better write-up in The Guardian if you are Fidel Castro or the leader of Hamas than if you're the Labour Prime Minister. Despite them rooting for Mr Brown when the hated Blair was in power, they now seem to concur that GB ought to be someone else, someone able to emote over the plight of mortgage-holders, someone as decisive as Tony Blair was over, say, Iraq. They adored Mr Brown for being Mr Notblair (“look, no grandstanding”) in the summer, but the moment that things got rough, they plunged into the water and made for their nests on Purity Island.

Take the NUT. The years of Labour rule have meant a rise in real terms in the pay of the average teacher of something just short of 20 per cent. There are smaller classes in primary schools, more time for preparation built in, thousands more teachers, a huge capital programme. The lion's share of the extra money spent on education went on improved conditions for staff. This couldn't go on for ever, and you can understand that some teachers might - albeit unjustifiably - be disappointed. Even so, they would recognise what has been achieved, wouldn't they? They would agree to go along with the award made by the independent pay review body, you'd think? The NUT's response was to organise its first strike since 1987, locking out children who it claims to care about in order to secure an even greater proportion of education spending for teachers' salaries.

So what does The Guardian say? Does it explain the Government's case and urge the NUT not to be so bloody selfish? Get out. “This strike was not whipped out of thin air, but born of genuine resentment,” blah, blah. “Tony Blair used to claim education was his first, second and third priorities, and teachers feel that Labour should be treating them better...” equivocate, bleat. This stuff lacks the necessary resolve and character that would have elevated it even to pusillanimous.

It's no better in the Parliamentary Labour Party. The creatures who moaned about Blair and bigged up Brown are whingeing again. Anything difficult, like 10p, and they don't see it as any part of their job to explain or defend their own Government. Much easier to bend the ear of a passing hack about the hard time they had back in the constituency. And they thought politics was all about cutting the ribbons on new hospitals.

It isn't just the 20 licensed super rebels, specific only to Labour (the Tories don't have this hard core of perpetually oppositional MPs who get in on the party's coat-tails and then spend all their time trying to defeat it), but now the moaning, hoary-lock-shaking chorus of ex-ministers, a decade's political detritus, upset that their questionable sagacity and their undoubted impatience seem never likely to be rewarded. Together these groups drag like rusty anchors along the political sea-bed as Labour's vessel tries to inch through the swell.

These characters, all of them, essentially agree with the bullish Tory commentators about something. It is that the inversion of the natural order, represented by Labour rule and Conservative opposition, should come to an end; that the long exile of the ruling classes from their birthright should be terminated, to the relief of all.

Mr Brown, damaged by his own treatment of his predecessor, has made several tactical mistakes and one strategic error. He didn't realise how quickly one dominant narrative can be replaced by another, and he failed to hold the election that could have saved him. The result has been that, for six months, no one has asked the Government anything but the most hostile questions, and no one has asked David Cameron any difficult ones. The next election is being won and lost by default.

The question that centre-left progressives like me will have to answer is whether we're bothered. Tony Blair's mission, unexplained even to himself perhaps, was to make it not matter whether the Tories came back, as they would be hemmed in by Blairism just as Labour was by Thatcherism. Today, strangely, I find myself less complacent about this than the Guardianistas.