British statesmen have often had to stand in the place where Gordon Brown stands now, looking back on a career of distinction, but looking forward to the almost inevitable loss of power. Their fate was summarised by Francis Bacon, the Lord Chancellor whose own career ended in disgrace.

In his essay Of Great Place, he listed the normal sequence of events: “The rising unto place is laborious and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base, and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse.”

Bacon was the most important philosophical thinker to have held high political office in England. Alexander Pope called him “the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind”. The rest of us might be more charitable to his ghost.

Gordon Brown is now facing his last stage in office. His friends are deserting him, his party is deserting him, the public is deserting him. Even Scotland is deserting him. He may suffer an immediate downfall if some young Turk does to him what young Turks were in the habit of doing to Ottoman emperors.

More probably, his career will suffer a gradual eclipse and will be ended, ceremoniously and democratically, at an election in two years' time. The coming two years are themselves likely to be painful. Very few Prime Ministers ever clamber out of the pit of unpopularity into which Mr Brown has fallen. Balfour could not; how can Brown?

There is, unfortunately, no doubt about Mr Brown's current unpopularity, or about the unpopularity of the Labour Party. The recent polls, the May local government elections, the loss of the London mayoralty and, most emphatically, Labour's defeat in the Crewe & Nantwich by-election, all show it. There have been many unpopular Prime Ministers before, of whom John Major is the most recent example. Gordon Brown has joined their group, in less than a year since he took office.

We ought to feel sorry about what has happened to him, genuinely sorry, not merely using pity as a form of rhetoric to rub salt into the wounds of his reputation. George Bernard Shaw put it very fairly: “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.” Throughout his ten years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Brown always exposed to public view his intense ambition to become Prime Minister. He is indeed an able and serious politician, but he yearned obsessively for Downing Street, and now it has turned to ashes in his grasp.

Nowadays the credit crunch, the rising prices in oil and food, and the growth of government borrowing have rubbed some of the lustre off Mr Brown's image as a Chancellor. Labour speakers, or some of them, still hold him out as the best Chancellor since Gladstone, or some such personage. He may not really have been that, but he was in his first parliament a good Chancellor, if only because he was sticking to expenditure limits inherited from the Conservatives. He remained powerful throughout his time as Chancellor, though his spending plans were running out of control after 2001.

The job of Chancellor is always a difficult one. To do it competently is to do it well. If one looks at the Labour front bench after 1997, no figure stands out as a plausible alternative Chancellor in the Blair Government. Tony Blair himself would have been very unconvincing in the role. Gordon Brown deserves most criticism for his relations with his own Prime Minister. He obstructed the Blair reforms of health, education and welfare that had been promised in Labour's 1997 manifesto. From Blair's point of view he must have been a very uncomfortable and uncooperative colleague. Where they differed, as on hospitals and schools, Blair was usually right and Brown wrong.

Certainly, one needs to recognise the personal pressure that has been placed on the Prime Minister. Yet the Labour Party, which has a job to do, is suffering from the Prime Minister's unpopularity, as well as from its own. Parties provide the mainsprings of democracy. If one looks at the recent precedents, parties have found it impossible to make any progress once they were expected to go out of office. Two years before election defeats, the Conservatives in 1962, Labour in 1977, or the Conservatives again in 1995, looked as if they were already doomed and became less and less effective.

There are now two years to go before the next election, but Labour may have two parliaments - or more - before the party can expect to get back into office. After 1979, Labour was out of power for 18 years; since 1997, the Conservatives have already been out of power for 11 years. In the 1950s the Conservatives won three general elections in a row, and held office for 13 years. Such defeats, even if they only result in two parliaments in opposition, can wipe out a parliamentary generation for the losing party, many of whom never see office again.

In 1997 the Labour Party managed to seize the role of the party of reform; sometimes the big reforms, as after 1945, do come from the Left. Equally often, as after 1979, they come from the Right. However, Labour failed to take the reform opportunity after their huge 1997 victory. Now it is the Conservative Party which is claiming the role. Change can only come from a position of strength, not from a position of eclipse.

People do not give power to parties in decline. Labour may take ten or more years to recover from their present situation.

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