There’s a rare degree of consensus about at the moment on where Britain’s political situation has got to, so I thought I would treat readers to my take on the current situation.

Firstly, I don’t buy this overall story that it’s now inevitable that Gordon Brown is finished. The parallel most in my mind has been John Major’s position in the spring of 1994. Then, as now, it was the accepted wisdom among political commentators that the Prime Minister would be ousted in a matter of weeks, and that inevitably, Ken Clarke (in 1994) would replace him in Downing Street. That was no less accepted fact then than Brown’s demise is now - indeed more so, I would say. But in fact what happened was that there was no moment of resolution in 1994, the immediate crisis passed and when, a year later, John Major did cause a leadership election, it was on his own terms and no serious rival came forward to challenge him. And indeed we should not forget the parallel of that leadership election either - this current Prime Minister has an established record of ensuring he is the only candidate in a party leadership election - something which, incidentally, you would think to listen to some people now was an accident. It was of course no such thing, but the direct result of Gordon Brown spending many years carefully wooing MPs and other key figures to ensure exactly that happened when Blair finally went.

And while it’s obviously not something that you can count on, we shouldn’t forget either the potential impact of sudden and shocking events. In the days after September 11 2001 all sorts of things that had hitherto seemed immovably set in stone changed in a matter of days. If some dramatic attack on Britain or elsewhere - and it need not necessarily be on the scale of 9/11, or the July 7th 2005 London bombings - were to happen, it’s not at all difficult to imagine events working out in such a way that people would turn back to Gordon Brown as a solid and figure, highly experienced in government and, as his defenders say, the best person to steer Britain through coming choppy waters.

In such circumstances, would people trust Gordon Brown or David Cameron more? Maybe the public perception of Cameron has moved on so much now that they would prefer him. But for my money I’d still say that people would hold on to nurse, for fear of something worse. Cameron’s ratings are still far more driven by comparative perceptions of Brown, than they are by perceptions of Cameron, and an emergency - depending hugely, of course, on what it was as well as how it was handled - would change that dynamic quite powerfully.

And indeed the little evidence we have of Brown’s handling of such circumstances, from the terrorist disturbances that took place in the few days after he took power, is that he handled them well (even though the whole episode always reminded, me for some reason, of the scene where the Minister of Magic first appears to the Prime Minister in Harry Potter, to explain various odd goings-on around the country).

But of course perhaps the way that Brown was perceived during those incidents in July 2007, reflected not particularly how he handled them, but the general positive underlying public view of him at that time. It seems like such a long time ago that we need to take a deep breath to remember how different that was, a year ago.

Here are some of the things that, for example, I was writing last summer about how Brown was really making the most of his dominance, and the weakness of Cameron’s position. The political received wisdom then was that Brown was in the ascendant, giving the country and the Labour party the breath of fresh air and change that it needed after ten years of Blair in Downing Street. Cameron hadn’t yet completely failed, but as I wrote here, he had not made the impact that he needed to, and his chances were fast running out.

While everyone else was talking up the great new dawn of having Brown rather than Blair, I was disagreeing, saying that I thought that, while Brown might be popular for a few months, a year down the line, he would be no more popular than Blair, and probably less so, and seen simply as a continuation of the same government of the last ten years (for example in this article, in which I realised that ‘My Tony Years’ had in fact been really ‘My Gordon Years’).

On some of this I was right: that Brown’s bounce would indeed be merely temporary - though I certainly didn’t foresee the dramatic way it would come to an end, calling off a General Election he himself had put on the table.

But I was quite wrong to suggest that a year down the line the Brown era would be seen as simply an extension of the Blair era. Rather, the Blair period is now seen retrospectively as some kind of golden age, with the Brown era a period of failure when compared to it. This was certainly not how many in the Labour party who now complain of Brown, spoke of Blair at the time (again, somewhat predictably).

For what it’s worth I don’t actually think this is true. I don’t honestly think that the Brown government in 2008 is really any more incompetent than the Blair government in, say, 1998. It’s just that story has moved on: the media - and the public, who drive what the media say more than either want to admit - are no longer really interested in a story of government competence. We’re bored and want a change, and a few things going genuinely wrong has given the story the impetus which means that now every time a civil servant leaves a laptop on a train - wrong, even incompetent, but not really actually the Prime Minister’s fault - it gets publicised and reinforces the image of a failing government.

But stories based on such insubstantial and transient foundations, can change, and change quickly. It doesn’t have to be a major disaster like a bomb going off - even one well-judged speech can be the root cause of turning it round, as George Osborne showed last autumn.

So yes, it’s possible that the story will continue to develop along the lines of Brown failure, and success for the Conservatives. But when Cameron’s high levels of support are based mostly not on anything about himself but on what is in many ways just a long run of bad luck for his own opponent, we would do well to remember that something actually important changing, or even just three or four things going well over a few weeks, can create a momentum of success for the government and Labour more than sufficient to turn the whole political situation, again, on its head.