All the hand-wringing by Tony Blair’s enemies — within his own party, of course — has obscured the true position. Recent polls have put Labour on 32-33 per cent against 36-37 per cent for the Tories. Not good, but nothing compared with the 10 to 15-point midterm deficits that the Tories had in the 1980s before going on to win the subsequent elections.

Admittedly, the new Labour brand is tarnished. The conference poll by Populus for The Times, undertaken between September 8 and 10 (for details see www.populuslimited.com), shows that belief in Labour having a good team of leaders has plunged by 22 points to 31 per cent over the past year, while the number thinking the party is united has dropped by 32 points to 14 per cent. As ominous, the proportion thinking that Labour is competent and capable has fallen 15 points to 36 per cent.

Yet voters still prefer a Labour to a Conservative government, by a 51 to a 43 per cent margin. Throughout the last Parliament, a big majority of voters were both dissatisfied with the Government and still preferred Labour to the Tories in office. Dissatisfaction has risen since spring 2005, from 65 to 78 per cent, but the number still preferring Labour has slipped only from 55 to 51 per cent. There are warning signs: the number satisfied with Labour has declined from 22 to 16 per cent, while the number dissatisfied with Labour and preferring the Tories has risen from 32 to 43 per cent.

Voters are ambiguous about the departure of Mr Blair. Just 35 per cent think that Labour will be more attractive to them once he has gone, with 59 per cent disagreeing. Moreover, two thirds (68 per cent) think that “Labour has really changed from its old Labour past and won’t go back even when Mr Blair retires”. The public is evenly divided about whether government policies would significantly change if Mr Brown took over.

Mr Brown’s dilemma is that voters are both familiar with him and uncertain about him as Prime Minister, as Andrew Cooper, of Populus, wrote in The Times on Saturday. Two thirds believe that, if Labour is to regain the trust of voters, “the successor to Mr Blair will need to be someone much less associated with the Government’s failings than Mr Brown”. According to a separate Populus poll for the BBC Daily Politics show, only a third believe that Mr Brown has changed his image in the past 12 months for the better, with three fifths disagreeing. Moreover, while voters place Mr Blair exactly where they are on a Left-Right spectrum, they put Mr Brown clearly to the left.

Mr Brown consistently suffers in a direct match-up with David Cameron, both on voting intentions and on personal characteristics (as shown by a recent ICM poll in The Guardian). Mr Brown still has a huge amount to do to change his public image. But the results are hardly comforting for Mr Cameron; it is just that Mr Brown’s ratings are worse.

Mr Brown and Mr Cameron both have a lot to do to emulate Mr Blair’s stellar ratings in the mid-1990s. He remains the one to beat.

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