Alan Watkins: Even the most servile realise Mr Blair's time is up, but who will lead the coup?

At the least, he should make his intentions clear to his colleagues

Four months, more or less, have gone by since the attempted coup against Mr Tony Blair. After the stirring events of early September were displayed before our wondering eyes - secret messages, public denials, declarations of devotion, reconciliation all round - it is curious that what used to be the People's Party finds itself in much the same position as it was in at the beginning of autumn 2006.

A promise to leave office before the 2007 conference season was extracted from Mr Blair. Apart from that, nothing has really changed. If anything, the level of dissatisfaction in the Parliamentary Party is higher than it was just before the conference season began.

In that far away period, those of us with no more than an ordinary memory will recall, our MPs took to sending emails or possibly even more electronically advanced messages to one another. They were at a loose end, between the return from the Mediterranean and the descent on Blackpool; and Satan, as the Whips are only too well aware, always makes work for idle hands.

Whether he was responsible or not, Mr Gordon Brown got the blame. Unfortunately Mr Brown was not at his most sparkling or even at his most eloquent, a condition which suits the Chancellor better. Mr Blair dealt effortlessly with the conspiracy, if such it was.

His grasp of the fake-demotic, that his wife was not about to go off with the bloke next door, won laughter and applause throughout the hall. The late Max Miller could not have told it better. Was there not also a hint of the fictional Archie Rice? After all, it was the dramatist John Osborne who told us himself that his creation had been based partly on Miller. And Rice, like Mr Blair, was coming to the end of his career. Mr Blair likewise remained defiant to the end.

He would not go now, at Christmas or in the New Year, not before the spring budget or the May elections, but before the party conference. The first of May 2007 would have provided - would still provide - a suitable tenth anniversary. In fact he passed H H Asquith in January 2006, having served for eight years, eight months. He would have to wait until November 2008 before beating Margaret Thatcher's record of 11 years, six months.

Such was the mood in the few days immediately following Mr Blair's conference speech - in the hall itself, in the party generally and, not least, in the Murdoch press - that the Prime Minister could have smiled away right to the day his pension was first drawn. How different today!

''Don't leave us Tony,'' so The Sun implored then. The same paper drew a comparison with Mrs Thatcher in 1990, as others did similarly. He was being pushed out by ungrateful colleagues who were unworthy of him.

The comparison was valid to the extent that both Prime Ministers were unpopular with their colleagues and the electorate alike - though all the papers who took the analogy claimed fancifully that both politicians were much-loved at the time. But the purported comparison between Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair was invalid because, well before the election of 2005, he had made a promise to resign before the next election after that.

This was more than a promise. In the argot of Old Labour, it was what was called a pledge. This particular usage was continued and sanctified by New Labour. The details of Mr Blair's initial pledge need no longer concern us. Like New Labour, we have moved on. Mr Blair's most recent pledge, or promise, is to take his leave before the next party conference.

In the next few days, the National Executive Committee is supposed to be meeting. Among its tasks is to lay down a procedure for the election of Mr Blair's successor and of a new deputy leader of the party. After his election as party leader and, more particularly, after becoming Prime Minister, Mr Blair and his cohorts behaved as exponents of democratic centralism in the old USSR.

This was not surprising, as many of them were his initial, faithful followers. Some of them are equally loyal members of his cabinet, though that devotion may now be beginning to curl up around the edges. Thus in 2001 a new, unelected chairman was imposed on the party by the leader, even though the party had a perfectly good chairman of its own already (the current, appointed incumbent is Ms Hazel Blears).

My impression, however, is that the National Executive is less complaisant than it was in the brave days of the Blair revolution. If Mr Blair chose to try to set the machinery in motion in August or September - after the end of the parliamentary session but before the conference - then the committee might reply that it had plans of its own, thank you very much.

The Cabinet itself might reply in similar terms. Indeed, pushed, crushed creatures as they mostly are, they could still manage a cry of... well, what would they cry precisely? We can't go on like this? This is making us all look silly?

There is a pause for laughter at this point on the part of Dr John Reid and also of his colleagues, who perhaps take a different view of the Home Secretary. At the very least, Mr Blair should make his intentions clear to his colleagues. That, of course, would mean broadcasting his plans to the nation. And why not? As Mr Barry Norman is supposed never to have said. The present state of uncertainty is bad for everybody. It is almost certainly bad for Mr Blair.

For two years, from 1953 to 1955, this country suffered a similar period of uncertainty. There were many differences too, but the period in question is worth recalling all the same. In 1953 Winston Churchill suffered a stroke, which was kept out of the papers by a combination of politicians and press proprietors. The conspiracy, for such it was, proved remarkably effective. It would not have worked today, though one can never be entirely sure about these things.

At all events, the running of the country was entrusted to R A Butler, with Churchill's son-in-law, the young Christopher Soames, undertaking many of the administrative tasks involved. Churchill's heir-presumptive, Anthony Eden, was himself ill too, and was in any case preoccupied with foreign affairs.

Churchill was similarly involved. He was intent on staying in office because, he thought, only he could make peace with the Russians.

Eventually he was forced out, largely because of the determination shown by Harold Macmillan. There were several others who wanted to get Churchill out, understandably enough. But the leader of the group was the then lowly Minister of Housing, Macmillan. Who, I wonder will turn out to be Blair's Macmillan in 2007?