So Gordon, in the end, did not go for it. Having pored over the polls and studied the long-range weather forecasts for November, he decided it was too big a risk. Should we have been surprised? A man whose political career has been based on caution, on wounding but not striking, was not going to suddenly transform himself into a gambler, risking his government and his place in history just to be able to say that he had won his own election. Instead, he will have to live with the accusation that faced with a contest he could not be sure of winning, he bottled it.

As he surveys the wreckage this morning, Mr Brown must be cursing the fool who put him in this situation. How did he, having inherited a government with a healthy House of Commons majority and without having faced a fight even within the Labour party, come to be facing the most difficult political decision in his life just a few weeks later? The fool, of course, was the prime minister himself. He encouraged his lieutenants to stoke up election fever in a typically Brownite way; the way that his announcements at the Treasury were always prespun.

Now for the first time we have seen this method as prime minister. On the surface all was calm and proper; he was getting on with the job of governing Britain. Underneath, he was paddling away furiously, ensuring the election story was never far away from the headlines and conducting a phoney campaign that took him last week to Basra to announce troop reductions. The public saw that as a cynical exercise and it is hard to blame them. Not that Mr Brown’s lumbering approach left any scope for surprise. After all the speculation pumped up by Labour ministers and special advisers, a “snap” election would have had as much snap as ancient knicker elastic.

The case for fixed-term elections is arguable, which is why relatively few countries have them for parliamentary elections. But the prime minister, by his conduct, has been doing his best to make that case in recent weeks. The political precedent for all this, of course, is Jim Callaghan in autumn 1978. “Sunny Jim” was also advised by younger cabinet ministers to go for it but, after bizarrely singing a music hall song to the TUC’s assembled brothers, he broadcast that there would be no election. The nation was surprised, the Tories relieved and the unions furious, the more so when the election the following spring ushered in the Thatcher era.

It is a fair bet that Mr Brown will not be doing any public warbling but he will be broadcasting to the nation this morning, courtesy of the BBC, to explain his decision. He will say that the speculation was getting out of hand, that he has taken his decision in the national interest, that the public did not want a general election and that he is getting on with the job of running the country.

Will it wash? Mr Brown has to explain why he allowed his first party conference as Labour leader to be dominated by the election-that-never-happened. He has to explain why important government announcements such as Tuesday’s comprehensive spending review and prebudget report were brought forward in an unseemly rush. And he has to explain why he led everybody up the hill and down again.

In the light of today’s YouGov poll for The Sunday Times showing a Tory lead and a News of the World poll of marginals showing a Labour meltdown, Mr Brown has made the logical decision. But he will pay a price for it. In the past month he has ceased to look prudent and respectable and has come over as a coldly calculating political machine, every action and nuance being designed to wrongfoot his opponents. It is not an attractive image and will not quickly fade. Much more of it and voters will start to think his predecessor really was a pretty straight kind of guy.

Mr Brown’s first 100 days started well but have ended in dithering and disarray. The country now thinks less of him and he has only himself to blame. He is truly a victim of his own spin.