Will he go early? Not Howard, dummy – he will leave it as long as he can, hoping that a dirty bomb in Manhattan will go off the same day the Chinese economy falls over like one of those fake streetscapes in a Buster Keaton film. Plant the body of a roller-derby queen in the boot of Rudd’s Lexus, to be discovered in the same news cycle, and there’s your fifth term. Not much else will do it.

No, I’m talking about the other Brown man, PM Gordon, who is even now contemplating a years-early poll, to hit the Tories while they’re back in the basement.

Brown has had one of the most amazing turnarounds of recent decades – and one that should remind Rudd’s supporters that oppositions can snatch defeat from the epiglottis of victory. Before he ascended to the top job, Brown was running fifteen points behind Dolphin Dave Cameron, the Turquoise Tory, and everyone was talking about bypassing Gordon altogether – as an incovenient reminded of Labour’s grim chapel socialist past – and moving straight on to David Miliband (son of uncompromising Marxist theorist Ralph, and inheriting his father’s… hair), 41, sexy, modern, etc.

Now a coupla months after the accession, Cameron is right back where his Andropov/Chernenko-esque predecessors were in the opinion polls, and the “David Cameron’s Conservatives” (as the party has tried to convince local-election campaigners to present themselves, unusuccessfully) is in utter disarray. He’s pissed off the old rabid Right, as he intended to, but the bridge to modern Middle Britain has collapsed.

They’ve gone back to Brown in droves, as the dour Scottish gent – editor in the 70s of an essay collection describing a strategy for “Red Scotland” – has tacked back and forth, talking about the need to reinvent democratic institutions, then veering back to the right as regards taxes, beginning the retreat from Iraq while re-affirming lip-service to the American alliance, and on it goes.

Cameron meanwhile was thoroughly wrong-footed by a trip to Rwanda at the same time as his own constituency was under water from floods that most people believe – accurately or otherwise – to be a sign of global warming, the global meeting the local. Everyone was gobsmacked when a Rwandan reporter asked Cameron why he wasn’t at home. Yeah, amazing – the brown people watch BBC World. Who’d a thought?

Cameron suddenly looked flaky, Brown solid. What had changed?

The short answer is that Tony Blair had disappeared, like Tinkerbell, with a puff of theatrical flashpowder, as if he’d never existed. While he was around, hatred for him was such that Brown was tarred with it, by virtue of being his b-tch deputy. Cameron looked like a less narcissistically deranged Blair. Once Mr Tony dropped out of sight, Brown could establish a fresh identity, and Cameron, the schmuck, moved into the Blair slot. He never even saw it coming.

So there are good reasons for Gordon to go now, and try a rebuild a majority that would give the Labour another couple of terms – and quite possibly split the Tory party down the middle, into pro- and anti-European parties. All that stays his hand is the creeping fear that enough of middle Britain might grit their teeth and gird their loins and push the Tory clown car over the line. Which would turn Brown in an instant from former heir apparent to fool of the century.

Which possibly worries him more than the three years of policy implementation he would have lost.