The election sprint has turned into a marathon. Can Dave keep the lead?

For a man whose economic policies had once again been stolen by the government, George Osborne looked unusually cheery as he delivered the opposition response to the pre-Budget report on Tuesday. Alistair Darling had brazenly claimed as his own the Tories’ new ideas: raising the inheritance tax threshold, an airline levy and taxing foreign financiers. But to the shadow chancellor, this theft represented victory. ‘From this day on,’ he declared, ‘let there be no doubt who is winning the battle of ideas.’

It was a fair point. Mr Darling had spent the first half of his speech denouncing Conservative policy and the second half aping it. Conspicuous by its absence was the mysterious ‘vision for change’ which Gordon Brown had promised as he cancelled the election last weekend. The only vision was of deteriorating public finances, and the largest deficit in western Europe. The spending review had been the Prime Minister’s best chance to recover from the disaster of last weekend. As Mr Osborne already sensed, he had blown it.

The tables of British politics have, once again, turned in the space of just a few weeks. David Cameron has been transformed from the affable leader of a suicide mission into a potential prime minister. Mr Brown is no longer seen as a titan led by a moral compass, but a hesitant bungler. In all the excitement, few have noticed that the Liberal Democrats have weakened to the point of total collapse. Everyone is now working to a new timetable, with an election expected not on 1 November, but in 2009, or even 2010.

Much of the damage to Mr Brown is, of course, self-inflicted. Not since Jim Callaghan sang ‘Waiting at the Church’ to the baffled TUC congress in 1978 has the decision not to hold an election been surrounded by so much drama.