I knew the news was serious when the Today programme cancelled me yesterday morning. I had been booked for five minutes of not-too-heavy exchanges, just before the BBC radio programme's end at 9am. The subject was the emerging results of Thursday's mayoral and local government elections in England and Wales.

I did wonder at the choice of me, for I know my place. Think “thoughtful/amused/discursive” - the ideal guest, say, for an item concerning a talking dog that could bark “Boris” when asked who should be mayor of London. But for a coach-crash election killing hundreds of Labour councillors and leaving a Prime Minister in intensive care, Parris is not necessarily your man. “Measured”, “sombre”, “insider” would be the programme-assistant's watchwords. “Careless”, “facetious”, “outsider” are mine.

So the call at 8.30 (“events have rather overtaken us”) did not surprise or offend, and I had brewed myself a cup of coffee and sat down at my laptop to opine.

Opine. “All newspaper opinion-writers ever do,” someone once remarked, “is come down from the hills after the battle is over, and bayonet the wounded”. From the hills this morning, now that those elections are over, it is our job to descend, and discharge the grisly task.

I cannot say I enjoy taking a kick at the already-humbled. Memories of being a Tory at elections during the dog-days of John Major's bloodied but still-twitching administration are too strong. On Thursday night, while the results came in, I sat from 10 until 3 in the BBC's Westminster studios at Millbank as one of Richard Bacon's panel of guests on Radio 5 Live. Joining us at different times were two Cabinet Ministers, Ed Miliband and Andy Burnham, and these capable and public-spirited men looked so tired and shell-shocked that it seemed gratuitous to crow, and still does.

Mr Miliband said the message Labour had now to get across was how different and dangerous were the Tories, who deeply hated government and wanted to cut it wherever they could. Mr Burnham said the message Labour had now to get across was how David Cameron and George Osborne were just shallow copycats with no philosophy of their own - their ideas and plans merely aping new Labour. I didn't have the heart to put to Mr Burnham what Mr Miliband had said.

But my reticence arises from more than squeamishness. For commentators and politicians alike, now the battle is lost and the Labour casualties groan in the mud, begins a fortnight of po-faced nonsense in which few of us really believe. We shall be filling columns, and Labour MPs will be filling interviews and speeches, with every kind of advice except the thing we suspect to be true: the judgment that takes only two words to deliver, one of which I shall avoid in print.

To that in a moment. But oh with what beard-stroking solemnity we shall avoid saying this. With what moustache-twiddling ceremoniousness shall we insist on what we know to be twaddle. Prepare yourself then for a great barrage of phrasemaking that will involve the endless repetition, in no particular order, of the following thoughts, typically conjoined with Gordon Brown's name:

wake-up call

message from the electorate

take it on the chin

listen to voters

learn lessons

heed concerns

need for change

get back in touch

sharpen up the act

show contrition

find a new narrative

feel their pain

show humility

understand more

blitz of initiatives

sense of purpose

simpler messages

sharpen the argument

clearer sense of direction

relaunch/refocus/rediscover/

redefine/repair/refresh/reshuffle/rethink/renew

begin fightback

still two years left

The general wisdom that Labour politicians will anticipate and themselves propose will be, in short, that on Thursday large parts of the British electorate told their Labour Government to pull up its socks, and put it on notice of a general election defeat if it failed to do so.

Sadly, this is a total misreading. On Thursday the voters told Labour to - well, let us say “push off”. By their votes and abstentions they indicated that they don't like the Government any more. They said they've gone off the new Prime Minister in a big way. They didn't mention anything about being ready to change their minds and I don't for a moment believe they are disposed to.

It's over. There was nothing constructive in the voters' message. These elections were not an invitation to change. They were a big two-fingered salute, a raspberry, a pressing of the de-trousered national buttocks to the window of the polling station. The voters are bored, tired, disillusioned and out of love. The affair, which in 1997 was (for the British people) uncharacteristically intense, is over, and the falling out is correspondingly bitter. Such flames are not rekindled - and certainly not by Mr Brown, whose personal stamp characterises this administration.

This columnist's advice to the Parliamentary Labour Party is therefore simple. Give up. With the leader you've got and led as you are, all is lost.

And there's a second strand to the duff commentary that will be assailing us from today onwards. Having denounced Mr Brown and all his works, pronounced him terminally useless, doubted his ability to get his show back on the road and hinted that he has personality flaws so deep as to doom his premiership, many commentators are going on to say that there can “of course” be no thought of a challenge to his leadership. Labour's rules are too complicated and cumbersome, they say. Labour MPs “lack the killer instinct” shown by Tories and “don't do regicide”. The advice is then concluded with the suggestion that the Party will just have to get behind its leader as best it can, stop rocking the boat, rediscover discipline and carry on to the bitter end hoping for an improvement that the writer has offered reasons for doubting Mr Brown will ever be capable of. I was guilty of this myself last week.

Gee, thanks, Mr Columnist. So I'll end by challenging this wisdom, though my challenge is ventured hesitantly and with no great confidence.

It is possible to get bogged down in technical wisdom and miss the obvious. Colleagues don't walk willingly into the bonfire, whatever the rules may say. If it becomes clear to most where the path is leading then one way or another a means may be found to abort the journey. I have no idea who might challenge Mr Brown, or how; but, reasoning backwards from an outcome that many of his tribe must wish for, my instinct is that a way to produce it might be found. Things happen. Where there's a will, there's a bayonet.

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