The global recession is now about a year old; it can be dated from early August of last year. The decline in the Labour Party's support is just less than a year old; it can be dated from last year's Conservative Party conference, from the contrast between the speeches of Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

Mr Brown uses this coincidence to blame his difficulties on external economic problems, an excuse that the public has not accepted. The Prime Minister blames the collapse of Labour's support on the credit crunch; the public remember that he was Chancellor from 1997 to 2006, and hold him responsible for the state of the economy. He is also blamed for the absurd promise to abolish boom and bust. That promise shows that he never understood how the world economy works. He seemed a safe pair of hands, but has proved a butterfingers.

However, there is a real connection between the recession and the revolt in the Labour Party. Unless there is a global recovery, Labour's position will get worse. A recent poll shows a Tory lead of 19 per cent, which would give them a majority of more than 150 seats. The next election has to take place by early June 2010. The argument for keeping Mr Brown as leader is that there could be an economic recovery before then.

This is not a strong reason for keeping a Prime Minister who has lost the confidence of voters. In the West Country, where I live, Tory canvassers are astonished by the collapse of the once loyal Labour vote. They report that, even in the old coal-mining districts, voters repeatedly say that they have always voted Labour, but “never again”.

After the pound had to leave the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, there was a similar reaction against John Major's Conservative Government. There was an economic recovery before the 1997 general election. The voters did not change their decision. The danger for Labour is that the recession will get worse.

Long-term economic forecasting is liable to error. Nonetheless, the outlook is disturbing. Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, may have exaggerated when he described the economic position as the worst for 60 or 70 years, but it remains bad. The credit crunch has destroyed confidence in the banking system. The bail-out of Fannie May and Freddie Mac has transferred a contingent liability of $5.4 trillion to the US Treasury, equal to the whole US national debt.

Lehman Brothers, which would have been considered “too large to fail”, may disappear this week if a rescue cannot be arranged. The world's airlines are losing money, and Alitalia cannot even afford fuel for its elderly aircraft.

Major recessions, of which this is one, take years before recovery. In Britain, the Great Depression started with the return to gold in 1925 and began to recover in 1933; in the US the depression began with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and only recovered with the demand for war equipment in 1939. If this recession only lasted for three or four years, it would run beyond the next election.

What can Labour do? The American conventions have shown the advantages of a fresh choice. Three of the four candidates, Barack Obama, John McCain and Sarah Palin have a real appeal to voters and seem to represent a new deal. They do not offer any convincing policy for ending the recession.

Perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect a Labour leadership election to throw up new proposals for dealing with the British recession. Yet the candidates would have to talk about the economy. Labour would also have to review its social policy. The failure to carry through the reforms that Tony Blair promised in 1997 was the beginning of Labour's decline. If Labour did have an election for a new leader, the policy debate would spread through the candidates, and opposition parties as well. That would make the Labour Party more interesting.

Mr Brown has his political skills; we should not underestimate them. But the most widespread criticism is that he is boring - people also see him as something of a bully. These were not criticisms made of Mr Blair, whom people found interesting even when they strongly disapproved of what he was doing.

It is usually true that boring men choose boring colleagues. Neville Chamberlain, whom his contemporaries found excessively boring, stuffed his Cabinet in the 1930s with such crashing bores that it would be unkind to name them. I remember one solemnly explaining his policy creed. “What I always say is, when you don't know what to do, the best thing to do is - nothing.”

A leadership election this autumn would show whether Labour has run out of intellectual creativity, or if there are new people who would put themselves forward, as David Cameron did in 2005. If, again, one looks at US politics, one might see greater vitality among the women. I am probably biased in favour of Ruth Kelly, as a fellow Roman Catholic, but she has a genuine individuality of interests and ideas. I think she could rescue Labour from being the boring party, just as Mr Cameron rescued the Conservatives from being the nasty party. Such changes of image, as with the Republicans and Mrs Palin, can rescue a party. Women are often better than men at changing a party's image.

I still think that Labour's obvious candidate for the leadership is their elected deputy, Harriet Harman. She has remained loyal to Mr Brown but moved to the left in her speech on social class to the TUC.

Both are shrewd moves. The three parts of the Labour electorate for leader are the unions, party members and MPs. The Blairites cannot win in the first two constituencies, both of which play well to slightly left-wing loyalists. If Labour MPs thought that she could help them to hold their seats, they would go along with Ms Harman. A Harman-Kelly battle would at least restore some interest to Labour politics, but it would not solve the world recession.

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