It was the great socialist orator, Aneurin Bevan, who in his resignation speech in 1951 reminded the House of Commons that the smallest of pebbles can cause the heaviest of avalanches. The incident involving the Prime Minister and the Sun, though trivial enough in itself, is, I fancy, one illustration of that. As a result of it, Brown was able to break free from the victim status that he had occupied ever since his very first months in No 10. The average citizen simply formed the view that enough was enough: like everyone else, the Labour leader might have his weaknesses but recognising those was not at all the same thing as declaring an open season for his persecution. It is even possible to argue that Brown gains from being painted warts-and-all. Thanks in part to Andrew Rawnsley's recent book, The End of the Party (see dialogue, p.32), he at least comes across as an authentic flesh-and-blood character, whereas there is something undeniably plastic about both David Cameron and the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. And it is in this area, of course, that there lies the other great difficulty over making any forecast about the result of the now imminent general election. For the first time, the three principal party leaders will appear head-to-head in three separate 90-minute TV debates. They will, I suspect, turn out to be a shade boring. But it is foolish to deny that by introducing this presidential element into our parliamentary system we have radically rearranged our traditional electoral customs and practices. This time it really will be a personality contest, with the differences between the parties reflected not so much by policies or manifestos as by our individual perceptions of three contrasting characters.

The hope naturally is that this will have its effect on voter turnout, with the percentage of those voting recovering at least a little from the low-point (hovering around 60 per cent) recorded at the last two general elections. I would not myself care to predict an outcome of increased voter participation: if the debates, as I fear they may, turn out to be uniformly tedious they could, I suppose, have precisely the opposite effect. But one thing I do already sense at least in my fingertips. The five-and-a-half hour TV ordeal to which the serious-minded among us will subject ourselves must, I think, reduce the danger of a hung Parliament. We shall, after all, be reaching our conclusions on identical evidence and it would be astonishing if something like a collective judgment does not take shape. I have always myself anyway been slightly sceptical of predictions of electoral contests destined to end in stalemate. It very rarely happens (the last time in 1974) and, while the increased number of Liberal Democrat MPs — 63 in the outgoing Parliament — makes it theoretically more likely, the more practical consideration has to be that, by some form of osmosis or whatever, the electorate tends to make up its mind decisively one way or the other.

My own personal hunch is that all is still to play for. Despite an unhappy few weeks — the botched airbrushed poster of Cameron, some slippage in his own performances at Prime Minister's Questions and, perhaps above all, the incredibly crassly handled affair of Lord Ashcroft and his tax undertakings — the Conservatives must still be favourites to win. It may well be that all we have witnessed over the past few weeks is a wobble and that the party will regain its equilibrium well before polling day. The LibDems have certainly struck lucky by achieving equality of treatment in the TV debates, though Clegg will probably still have to demonstrate that he is more than a lad asking to be sent on a man's errand. 

As for Brown and Labour, considering where they had to come from, it is no mean feat for them to have put themselves back in contention — and that they can claim already to have done.