A the beginning of 2006 a series of meetings between Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and their entourages, began to break down. “All he would say,” Mr Blair reported of his Chancellor, “is: ‘When are you going to eff off out of here?'.” “What is to be gained,” demanded Ed Miliband, one of Mr Brown's aides, of Mr Blair on another occasion, “by you staying on for a further six to nine months?”

I don't use these examples - which I believe to be true - to try to demonstrate the saintliness of Tony and the awfulness of Gordon. One of history's more dismal tasks will be to try to discern the degree of Mr Blair's own responsibility for his party's current problems less than a year after his departure. Perhaps longevity itself is the culprit, and it may well be that no government will ever serve more than a couple of terms ever again before it becomes the impossible lightning rod for every transient discontent. But that is an essay of its own.

The point was to illustrate, yet again, how much Mr Brown wanted to be Prime Minister, thought that he would be better at it than Mr Blair, knew that he would be better at it than anyone else and believed and desired all this - presumably - for some purpose. But it is (and I am not the first person to say it) a seeming mystery as to what that purpose was.

“Not Flash, just Gordon” was the way that the Labour Party was playing Mr Brown's lack of interactive charisma in those far-off honeymoon days of botched bombs and middling floods. What he may not possess in the pleb-pleasing department, it was averred, he more than compensated for in the grit-your-teeth-and-run-it division. Indeed, as the economies of the West came under pressure it could be argued that a long-bearded ten-year Chancellor was better placed than any number of fragrant Fauntleroys to lead us once again to the sunny uplands.

Any illusion I had that Mr Brown could do this was destroyed by Alistair Darling's emergency re-Budget the week before last. To deny for so long that there was a problem with people losing from the removal of the 10p tax band, subsequently to be forced to alter course as a consequence of backbench panic, to spend £2.7 billion that previously you hadn't had and finally to dress all that up as a response to the economic downturn, was to utterly contaminate the Brown brand. Not only not charismatic, the PM could no longer be defended as prudent or competent, but rather blown every which way by expedience.

Now every cop, nurse, teacher, be they ne'er so well paid compared with 1997, believes - with the abetment of Gadarene Labour MPs - that they too, can get something from the Treasury if they just open their mouths wide enough and scream and scream till everyone else is sick. Every super-polluting motorist, anachronistic post-office campaigner, anti-polyclinic GP and special interest placardeer must think that time is on their side. For the moment the Opposition will be doing nothing to disabuse them. All David Cameron's toughness is being reserved for hard targets like knife criminals and young spongers.

And to what purpose does Mr Brown, who wanted it all so much, hang on? Last autumn, even as the original ur-dither was being conjured into existence, it began to appear that Labour post-Blair was being tricksier and more dangerously populist than when Mr Blair had been at the helm. It was almost as though Labour was seeking to make up in slippery policy what it had lost in telegenic charm. There was the unnecessary and expensive reduction in inheritance tax, the unnecessary and damaging levy on non-doms, there was the selling of ID cards as being about foreigners, there was “British jobs for British workers”, there was the backward-looking ridiculing of David Cameron as an upper-class twit, there was the implementation of the pointless points system for immigrants. I wrote at the time: “Bribes, mild xenophobia and snideries don't add up to charting a clear direction of travel for the country.”

The result at Crewe & Nantwich - which was in line with recent opinion polls - may not have been altered much by Labour's anti-toff antics, but the party's tactics were symptomatic of fear and an absence of vision. The defeat was always likely, but the question was whether Labour could articulate an idea of why - in two years' time - the voters of Crewe might care to change their minds. What kind of world would Britain have to make its way in, and how might the country adjust to this challenge? Beyond the million irritations of ordinary life, what did the Prime Minister see as the way ahead? Were we to be a country open to trade, competitive, highly educated, flexible, a magnet to the talented and motivated from around the world? Or were we to settle back in our old habit of complacent but grumbling decline?

I'd say, right now, that the decline has it. Voters are to be treated like idiots, so every proposal to the PM from Labour sources seems to be freighted with chronic short-termism. For example, Mr Brown is advised to save the closing post offices, meaning their demise will just have to be put off to another time, when the losses are higher and the costs are greater. The same is true with not taxing gas guzzlers - it will simply have to be reattempted at some even less promising moment. Climate change hasn't stopped because credit is tight.

At the end of a Jeremiad such as this, readers may expect the writer to demand a leadership challenge and to nominate a trio or so of bright young things who could take over and, by so doing, effect a transformation. It's easily done, of course, and that's because it's rubbish. Any leader coming into office before 2010 (as Prime Minister, I remind you, not Leader of the Opposition) would have to make Barack Obama look like Cecil Parkinson. I have absolutely no idea whether Labour possesses anyone sufficiently remarkable.

No. Labour has a short time to think hard about what it wants to offer the people of Britain, and how to offer it. During that interregnum it would probably be better for Gordon Brown to continue and, in the knowledge of his likely electoral defeat, to begin to lead. In so doing he may actually render a greater service to the party he says he loves than his predecessor eventually managed to do. He may just as well not eff off.

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