Alan Watkins: My pub quiz of 2006: in what conditions did the Foreign Secretary become leader?

Some view the Promised Land through Brown's computer screen

The story goes that Mr Boris Johnson and Mr Jonathan Powell, who toils in No 10, happened on each other on their bikes at a zebra crossing or at traffic lights or wherever it was. In my experience travellers pedal purposefully ahead, looking neither to the right nor to the left and certainly not stopping, otherwise they would assuredly fall off. But evidently they are unusually well-behaved citizens of London SW1.

Apparently Mr Powell predicted that Mr Gordon Brown would fail to reach No 10, with which Mr Johnson was reluctantly forced to concur, whereupon these two political figures went their separate ways. Some months have elapsed since this small episode.

On the one hand, Mr Powell was being a little on the apocalyptic side. On the other hand, however, Mr Brown has experienced a perceptible lengthening of the odds. The first change is that, over the past couple of weeks, numerous Conservatives and even a few Labour members as well, have become convinced that Mr David Cameron will win the next election. The second change is that, despite Mr Tony Blair's dispiriting performance in the opinion polls, Mr Brown is cutting an even more sorry figure among the percentages.

The picture presented used to be different. It used to be the reverse. Mr Brown was the popular darling of the polls: more than this, he was the indulged pet of the People's Party. When he was up, all stern moral purpose and redistributist fervour, so Mr Blair was down, with a series of increasingly feeble excuses about how he had not managed to do better. But see what has happened. Mr Blair has done badly, but Mr Brown has done worse still. It was not meant to happen. A note of caution is necessary; it always is. The polls may restore Mr Brown's differential, as we used to talk about wages policy in the 1970s. What is evident is that the bulk of the parliamentary Labour Party and a large slice of the commentating classes have invested most of the family capital in Mr Brown.

We all know what we want to find in other people, as much in politicians as in the rest. Thus Mr Cameron has strung together a whole daisy chain of wholesome attributes; the only link missing is the quality that, once a PR man, always a PR man.

Likewise, Mr Brown is in the process of bankrupting the National Health Service through the operation of the Private Finance Initiative, not to mention through various other manifestations of Enron-style accounting. The means-test state which Mr Brown has established over the past nine years will not easily be dismantled. Those who place that faith in means-testing are perhaps more trusting than they are in dodgy methods of accounting. But a whole chunk of Labour is determined to view the Promised Land through Mr Brown's computer screen.

No doubt Mr Powell of No 10 will strike observers as a little bit exaggerated, as the woman from Edinburgh once described a visit to Swan Lake. But Mr Brown has two years, or at the most three, at his disposal, if Mr Cameron wins outright, or even if he manages to stitch an arrangement together with the Liberal Democrats.

There is a precedent which is not often recalled. The most creative domestic politician of the 1930s was Neville Chamberlain, much as Mr Brown was after 1997. Chamberlain despised Ramsay MacDonald as the leader of the ostensibly National, in reality Conservative, government after 1931; he held Stanley Baldwin in scarcely higher regard after 1935. Chamberlain waited his turn and succeeded Baldwin as smoothly as he had in 1937; the transition was effected as effortlessly as Mr Brown (and presumably as Mr Blair also) was to hope to effect it. But Chamberlain had three years, to be succeeded by Winston Churchill. He had a short period as Lord President before dying in 1940.

The pity is that Mr Brown failed to contest the election with Mr Blair in 1994. No doubt Mr Blair would have won, but the air would have cleared: the atmosphere would not have lain heavy with suspicion, resentment and unfulfilled ambition. Quite apart from the special circumstances of 1994, the Labour Party likes elections.

My pub quiz of 2006: in what conditions did the Foreign Secretary become leader of the Labour Party? Answer: It was in 1994, when as Deputy Leader in 1992-1994 Mrs Margaret Beckett became Leader of the Labour Party following the death of John Smith. Subsequently she contested both the leadership and the Deputy Leadership but lost to Tony Blair and John Prescott respectively. Not many people know that.

In 1976 the party dispensed with the Royal prerogative, though the machinery had been set up by the Shadow Cabinet on 21 January 1957 in the wake of Anthony Eden's resignation. Elections already had taken place on the opposition benches, as elections were to take place later on. But in 1976, with Harold Wilson's resignation, there were six candidates, with James Callaghan finally defeating Michael Foot.

The Conservatives have made exactly the same use in 1990 as the Labour Party had made 14 years previously, from a constitutional point of view. Mr Brown has, I see, been piously lamenting the Great Fall of Margaret Thatcher. In fact, the Prime Minister lost the support of her backbenchers and then of her cabinet colleagues. The first was dangerous but the second was fatal. All three candidates - Michael Heseltine, Douglas Hurd and John Major - conducted themselves admirably, even if there was some funny business with Mr Major's toothache.

I cannot for the life of me see why there should not be an old-fashioned Labour election. Even the Tories now have them, with a recent exception in the form of Mr Michael Howard. Dr John Reid burns with what the 19th-century critic Walter Pater calls the hard, gem-like, flame of unconfined ambition; Mr Alan Johnson has many qualities, some of them yet to be discovered; all kinds of likely lads and even more likely lasses may offer themselves to the voters.

There is perhaps something in the New Labour Air: a reliance on fixing as the sovereign remedy for all ailments. Elections are healthier all round.