Oh that was painful. Agony. It was squirmingly, screamingly, startlingly bad. It was dull. It was plodding. It was morose. “When he speaks to you it's like a mental block; I just zone out,” said a woman on Newsnight's floating-voter panel the night before. “Cheer up!” the panel unanimously urged the Prime Minister.

Cheer up? I nearly hanged myself from my hotel trouser press. In place of levity we had seriousness, hard work and a moral purpose. And New Rules.

There were some nice lines, but mostly it was a list, not a speech: thud after thud of meaningless proclamations - we will be the party of law and order, we will be the party of the family, this will be the British century.

Voters wanted a sense of direction. He gave them health checks, broadband connections and nursery places for Mancunian two-year-olds. (You cannot legislate to end child poverty.) They wanted his personal journey. He told them how he was once not in danger of being half-blind - but of being completely blind. They wanted hope. He gave them a victims' commissioner.

Just as I emerged from under the pillow, home straight in sight, Mr Brown gave us David, the ten-year-old tortured to death, and 20,000 children dying from disease. This wasn't a speech, it was a funeral oration. Even the sole joke was miserable: lucky I never expected to be popular! Boom-boom.

And delegates lapped it up. This is Labour at its worst, introverted, dogmatic, and huddled around a loser.

It was “an excellent conference speech”, said David Blunkett afterwards - “it'll need a bit of assessment as to how much it reaches the public outside”. Nicely put.

Yes, we need a new settlement, with an exit door for Gordon Brown. He has to go and he will. In the strange otherworld that has passed for a conference this week - “taking tea on the Titanic”, as one minister put it - that much is absolutely clear. Mr Brown is a good, decent man but he cannot lead Labour to the next election, not even with

J.K. Rowling on his side. He cannot communicate and he cannot inspire. Look at the polls; Labour is facing obliteration. Mr Brown is its Voldemort, the flight of death.

But how? How should he go? That need not be nearly as bad as the crazed grins on the faces of half the Government this week have supposed. The answer lies in the return of Tony Blair's praetorian guard: Alastair Campbell, John Prescott, Neil Kinnock, Philip Gould, the ghosts of 1994.

New Labour has turned full circle. Peter Mandelson has even, hilariously, got himself into the identical position of actively supporting Mr Brown (they talk often on the phone) while knowing he should be supporting a different candidate, David Miliband or James Purnell or whoever it turns out to be. It will be fascinating to watch that one play out again.

The ghosts have, for the most part, got it completely, utterly wrong.

These guys should be managing an exit strategy for Mr Brown, not hanging out on the conference steps like dementors, bullying passers-by into accepting stickers or pledging loyalty to the leader. They have got themselves in the wrong place on this. As a short-term tactic it is just about OK, but it is not - to borrow a familiar critique Mr Campbell used to make of successive Tory leaders - a strategy. “None of them are in the same class as Gordon Brown,” Mr Prescott declared of putative rivals. That is absolutely untrue: wrong, wrong, wrong. The campaign for a Labour fourth term could destroy its chances of achieving one.

It is over. The Blair-Brown era needs to end and they all should leave the stage. Mr Blair, now supposedly Labour members' preferred leader by a massive 43 per cent (they wouldn't say that if he were still here), may be the solution to unravelling this. It was always about both of them, Blair and Brown, and they should finish it together. I understand that in private discussions the two men have already faced the reality that the Prime Minister might not last the term. Mr Brown is no fool and he is a good Labourite. I think he will find a way to end it.

He should do the best a good man in his position can do; work out an exit strategy, call a leadership election and remain as Prime Minister until Labour elects a new one, perhaps next spring. The alternative is the slow and painful decline of the Prime Minister, resignation following resignation until Labour is as wounded as its leader, Mr Brown trying to cling on until his preferred heir is ready to inherit the crown. Meanwhile, the Conservatives escape unscrutinised.

Labour needs to find the best, the person who can cast a spell, its Harry or Hermione. It isn't good enough to seek to clear the way for David Miliband, as some are trying to do. He has not done as well as he should have this week to be considered the natural heir apparent. “They used to say Michael Heseltine tickled the clitoris of the Tory conference,” remarked one bright Labour aide after watching him address 200 natural supporters at the ultra new Labour Progress group. “David has just come in and patted them on the head.” We need to see all the candidates in a clean, open contest, untainted by the ghosts and battles of 1994. Let us have no “Blairites” or “Brownites”. Let us have David Miliband, and Ed Balls, James Purnell, Harriet Harman, Jon Cruddas - anyone else who thinks they stand a chance. Andy Burnham, perhaps. Ed Miliband, even. They should all stand.

The contest must be as wide as possible, to see which one possesses the magic the party seeks. One thing this week has shown very clearly: there is nothing to be downhearted about. Labour has a lot of talent to showcase. But Mr Brown has to make space for it. That is his moral purpose.

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