Throughout all this speculation about a possible General Election, I have argued that it is just Mr Brown winding everyone up, and he is not really planning to have an election this year. I set out the case for this here, and certainly he does really seem to have used the threat to tie Mr Cameron in knots over the summer.

However I have to admit that I have been wavering over the last few days. Several of the speeches in Bournemouth this week seem to have been very much geared up to trying to win votes in the near future. And there comes a point in the development of speculation about an election - speculation which is after all generated entirely by his own people - when it looks like either or both (a) weakness and/or (b) that you are just playing games with the electorate, not to call it. I should think that we are coming up on that point pretty imminently now - indeed already if he were to announce that it was all off, he would surely face some slightly awkward questions about why he had been ramping it all up so much and winding up the public when he had no intention of bringing it to a climax. The balloon has not yet gone up but it will need a bit of effort to haul it down and secure it again. It looks like pretty blatant political manipulation and I have argued before that his fondness for this is, sooner or later, going to p*** people off.

Faced with the same embarrassing dilemma as me, having rubbished the idea from the start, Nick Robinson has argued that it really was not on the cards over the summer, and it is only recently that it has become a real option. This is obviously quite an attractive rationalisation of the situation from the position that he and I are in - and perhaps he’s right. But I am not convinced - I don’t really understand what has changed Mr Brown’s view. Mr Robinson quotes the “positive” outcome for the government of the Northern Rock incident as responsible for, but I have to say I don’t find this very convincing. And although Mr Brown is somewhat ahead in the polls at the moment, it is only a couple of weeks - noticeably less than the length of an election campaign - since his position was very much more precarious. So basing this decision on a very transient opinion poll rating seems to me neither wise nor in keeping with Mr Brown’s general approach. A better candidate for the key new factor seems to me the state of the Tory party, especially if some of the rumours of divisions at the top are to be believed.

Maybe there is something new - or maybe I was just really wrong all along.

Either way, my gut feeling is that the patience of the British people for a Prime Minister - and particularly this Prime Minister, with his reputation for manipulativeness - wavering very publicly and ever longer about whether to call an election, and making such a decision about the nation’s governance so blatantly on the basis of opinion poll ratings and whether he can shaft Mr Cameron, will sooner or later start to seriously annoy the public.

It is certainly difficult to square with his early Prime Ministerial rhetoric about governing in the interests of all, and not simply playing politics. And I find it difficult to see how over time, his ongoing attempts to convince us all simultaneously of two mutually contradictory things simply by using clever words, will not see him come a cropper.