Gordon Brown, on the ropes as never before, will play for time as he struggles to save his party’s skin and prevent himself becoming the first Prime Minister since James Callaghan never to win a general election.

As they surveyed the wreckage of Labour’s worst night at the polls for four decades, ministers and MPs were unanimous on one thing: Mr Brown will not go to the country until he has to. And that means the early summer of 2010. That presents a huge opportunity and a potential elephant trap for David Cameron, bathing yesterday in the glow of a triumphant showing, with his party at last making the start of a breakthrough in the North and Wales, and picking up seats just about everywhere else.

Pushing the Prime Minister up against the 2010 barrier, denying him an earlier chance, would in itself be a victory for Mr Cameron. If his party continues to progress along yesterday’s path it will leave Mr Cameron in the same position as Tony Blair in 1997: waiting for a landslide. He will have been given another two years to prove that he is not, in Mr Brown’s words, a “shallow salesman” and to convince the doubters, many of them within his own party, that he has the mettle to lead the country.

There is, however, another side to that coin, and it is the one upon which the Prime Minister is counting. It is that Mr Brown, having gone from hero to electoral liability in the course of just a few months, will indeed recover, steer the country through a difficult economic patch, and start to win the voters over again.

The Conservatives, in Mr Brown’s dream scenario, will at last have the scrutiny from the media that he thinks they warrant and fall apart under the pressure of the long wait for the election. There will be longer for Mr Cameron and his team to foul up and longer for the Labour Treasury team to pick holes in their economic sums.

The first signs of Mr Brown’s fight-back strategy were immediately apparent yesterday. He has told his closest friends that being Prime Minister is a lot harder than he thought it would be. Tony Blair would have told him had he asked. In those long years while he was impatiently preparing to take over at No 10, Mr Brown, then the Chancellor, won an unhappy reputation as someone who never seemed to be around when the Government was in trouble.

Macavity Brown is no more. The influence of his strategy chief, Stephen Carter, could not have been more apparent as Mr Brown made a televised visit to Labour campaign headquarters late on Thursday and invited the cameras into No 10 as early as he decently could yesterday morning to take the “bad” results on the chin. There will be a lot more of that over the weekend. Mr Brown’s minders will no longer allow him to hide.

Another element of the relaunch was there in Mr Brown’s words. “The test of leadership is not what happens in a period of success but what happens in difficult circumstances,” he said. He would show “courage and conviction” to overcome Labour’s troubles. “I said I was going to listen and lead,” he said. “We are in difficult economic circumstances. I think people accept that we are going through some of the most challenging times we have seen in many years. We have listened and learnt from that and we will move forward.”

Those remarks had been carefully prepared. Mr Brown will now draw on his experience of ten years at the Treasury, when his success was a big factor in Labour’s winning run, to show that he is the man to lead the country through troubled times. Friends tell Mr Brown that he must not underestimate Mr Cameron but he will not be shaken from his belief that, in the end, the public will accept that he is a more substantial figure than his Tory rival.

Mr Brown is unlikely to fall in with demands from some of his Labour critics for a full reshuffle. He accepts that “rearranging the deckchairs” will fool and please nobody. In this dismal election campaign Mr Brown’s Cabinet has not been the negative issue; it has been Mr Brown himself. He was the architect of the 10p tax debacle that so damaged Labour. He knows it and he knows that only he can put it right.

As for his own future, he will be given time. Cabinet ministers told The Times yesterday that Mr Brown, who has yet to reach his first anniversary at No 10, will not be challenged from within. They said he had to be given a chance to show that he could turn things around and that, in any case, it would be in no one’s interests to put their head above the parapet now.

Mr Brown will try to fight back by governing and delivering. “Delivery” was a favourite word of the Blairites. Now it is used by the people around Mr Brown, who will set out in the next few weeks a draft Queen’s Speech laden with new measures to show that Labour is not running out of steam.

Mr Cameron had every reason to be cock-a-hoop as he talked yesterday of a “very big moment for the Conservative Party”. He said: “I think these results are not just a vote against Gordon Brown and his Government, I think they are a vote of positive confidence in the Conservative Party.

“I think people see a party that has changed for the better, that is united, that has got a strong team of leaders, and increasingly they are looking to us, trusting us, to speak out on the issues they really care about.”

Then Mr Cameron summed up the challenge facing him. He did not want anyone to think that the Tories would deserve to win an election just on the back of a failing government. “I want us to really prove to people that we can make the changes that they want to see in terms of schools and hospitals and crime and the other issues that really matter to all of us, and that is what I am going to devote myself and my party to doing over the next few months.”

In the Tory high command and the grassroots yesterday there was real excitement, a belief that Mr Brown is irreparably damaged. They believe that the 10p tax row gave people a respectable reason to dislike him, one that will remain long after any measures are brought in to sort it out. They believe that the parallel with 1995, when John Major was assailed by similar council results only to be turfed out two years later, is irresistible. Mr Brown will fight to stop history repeating itself; Mr Cameron to ensure that it does.

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