AFTER THE SHOCK, a strange calm fell upon Westminster. From the Prime Minister down, the watchwords were “Don’t panic”. It was as if last Wednesday had never happened. Ministers occupied themselves with routine. Official cars ferried secretaries of state and their red boxes between Whitehall and the Palace of Westminster, just like any other week. There were parliamentary questions to be answered, letters to be signed, Orders in Council to be made. The Government’s response to three big direct hits was a doggedly downbeat “business as usual”.

I found it eerie. I remembered, many summers ago, watching a mule stumble and break its foreleg. They don’t treat badly injured animals in Bolivia, they just let them die, and this beast had received a death sentence. Who knows what, if anything, a mule knows? The animal picked itself straight up from the ground and, one leg dangling uselessly, began grazing again, or trying to.

To mules as to ministers, small, everyday tasks may represent a kind of displacement activity. In grief or in shock we can find ourselves tidying a room, blankly turning the pages of a book or mindlessly continuing with whatever little job it was we were engaged in when the disaster struck. It can help recovery.

I do not, however, believe that Tony Blair’s administration will recover from this. Maybe I am overreacting, maybe something like business as usual really will be resumed, and maybe the beast will graze wretchedly on for a couple of summers more, but he’d be lucky. It is equally possible we shall look back on this, the last weekend of April 2006, and murmur wisely that the ice field was shortly to crack.

This could be Jack Straw’s moment. Or Alan Johnson’s. Or John Reid’s.

Take my analysis with a pinch of caution because I am a Conservative and I realise that the Labour Party is a different animal. If Tony Blair were a Tory Prime Minister then the Parliamentary Conservative Party would be dispatching him this weekend. The men in suits would be meeting privately, his closest colleagues would be advising him candidly and he would know that the choice was between a dignified and voluntary departure according to an unhurried timetable of his own — and a messy challenge from a stalking-horse candidate, an ugly contest, a wobbly win and a ragged retreat.

Labour doesn’t do this kind of thing, wise friends keep telling me. It never has.

Well maybe it should. And maybe this time the sheer blinding obviousness of the need for someone to break the silence may trigger a break with habit. Someone has to mention the elephant in the room. The Prime Minister has left our planet. He is delusional. If the week just passed cannot convince him that his time is over, nothing will.

Like his friend Silvio Berlusconi, he means to cling on in defiance of reason, in the vain hope that something will turn up.

And he can do this. No event is going to dislodge him. Civil war in Iraq? Mr Blair will feel the need to stay in command to help to sort it out. Mayhem with the Taleban in Afghanistan, Cuban-missile-crisis-style brinkmanship with Iran? George W. Bush will surely need his best friend at his side. Big trouble with his flagship education Bill? Now, more than ever (Mr Blair will reason), the new Labour project needs him at the helm. Inhabited as he is by a belief that Destiny has called him, there is nothing that can happen, however bad, that will persuade Tony Blair that without him it would be even worse. Come what may, Tony Blair is determined to have his full decade at the helm, surpass Margaret Thatcher’s record, and then some.

Critics and doubters in his party seem to be hoping that sooner or later there will be some sort of divine signal, a message written in the stars or carried to us on the wind, that the time for the changeover has arrived. This will not happen. Gordon Brown’s worst fears are right.

Time and again the Chancellor’s courage has failed him, and his willingness to wound yet reluctance to strike is beginning to look unpleasant, not to say indecisive. Something in me says it is not now certain he will be his party’s next leader. The nearer the destination, the more it’s slip-sliding away.

Somebody once observed of the British that there are circumstances in which even to escape death we cannot bring ourselves to jump a queue. Mr Brown is in just such a tangle as regards the leadership, and the Labour Party is in that tangle as regards Mr Brown. The knot must be cut. If Mr Brown will not push in and elbow Mr Blair aside, someone must push in and elbow Mr Brown aside.

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