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That's it. I'm off on my hols.
Rarely have I gone away so uncertain what the next few months will throw up.
When I return I'll be back to the day job after a couple of enjoyable, though exhausting, weeks presenting the Today programme.
Extraordinary, quite extraordinary. Anyone listening to David Miliband taking phone calls on Radio 2's Jeremy Vine show could be in no doubt.
This is a man testing the waters for a leadership bid and a man simply unprepared to come to the defence of a beleaguered prime minister.
Even when listeners poured abuse on Gordon Brown the most the foreign secretary could bring himself to say was that he was a prime minister in difficult times, that he had huge experience and good strong values - not exactly the warmest endorsement of the man who leads his party.
What's more, when listeners said how much they liked him he merely giggled and made jokes that these were not his friends or his mum who'd been paid to ring up - in other words he took all the praise and did nothing to deflect the abuse headed in Mr Brown's direction.
Whatever David Miliband's original intention was he has now begun a process where the country and his party will begin to judge whether he is a good replacement for Gordon Brown. It won't be long until some newspaper commissions a poll as to whether voters prefer him to Mr Brown.
If there is a Miliband poll bounce which is quite likely given the favourable publicity he's had and the extraordinary unpopularity of the prime minister, Labour MPs will begin to assess whether he's the man who might save their skins. In other words this will produce a momentum of its own.
Many cards remain, of course, in the prime minister's hands. On returning from holiday he could demote Mr Miliband, he could give him the poison chalice of the chancellor's job, or he might produce a new policy plan to regain the political initiative. However he will do so against the background in which for the first time since he faced Tony Blair, a genuine rival has emerged.
What on earth did he mean by that? That is the only question that matters about today's extraordinary intervention by David Miliband in the debate about how the Labour party recovers.
Now no doubt, he will say that we should understand him to mean precisely what he wrote and not a word more. Why then do I and most political observers refuse to take his article at face value? Quite simply because in politics context is all.
Consider the choices that faced the foreign secretary at a time when there is furious speculation about a challenge to Gordon Brown.
Firstly he could have called for that speculation to stop and for people to fall in behind the leader. He did no such thing. Indeed Gordon Brown is not even mentioned in his article.
Secondly he could have said nothing at all and simply gone on holiday. But oh no, he chose a third option. To set out the way forward for the party without doing anything to prop up his leader's position.
So what on earth did he mean by this? Not, I'm sure, an open challenge to Gordon Brown. The foreign secretary has no intention of trying to bring him down. On the other hand he does want to make it clear that in this leadership contest - if there is ever one - he will not hesitate, he is ready for the fight. And he will represent the candidate promising change.
I breathed a sigh of relief yesterday when a Labour MP publicly declared that he wanted Gordon Brown to go. This is not, I should stress, because I want to see the back of the prime minister. It was because I was becoming aware of the yawning gap between what was said to be happening in private - plots, cabinet coups and backbench revolts - and what politicians were saying in public.
Viewers, listeners and readers can conclude either that this gap exists because politicians say one thing in private and something very different in public. Or because political journalists talk things up. The truth, I would contend, is that there's a bit of both involved.
Since I'm still moonlighting on the Today programme at the moment (hence the rather irregular blogging) I discussed this issue on air this morning with two veterans of political reporting - Chris Moncrieff, the former editor of the Press Association and Elinor Goodman, the former political editor of Channel 4 News. You can hear our discussion here.
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My main reflection, on the excitement of recent days, is that journalists should be prepared to admit that we don't know what's going to happen to Gordon Brown, because the politicians we speak to don't know, because they have yet to make up their minds.
What I can say with confidence is that the public words of support for the PM often do not reflect the private misgivings I hear. What's more, it's clear that many ministers and Labour MPs will spend the summer wrestling with their consciences, weighing up their personal interests and debating with their friends how to get the Labour Party out of the hole they're in.
The initiative always lies with political leaders. They can reshuffle their team, announce new policies, hold press conferences and the like. It takes someone or some group who are willing to risk their career and their reputation to bring a leader down. Often those people are not "the usual suspects" or the "men in grey suits".
It was, after all, an obscure Tory backbencher - Barry Porter - who first called on Margaret Thatcher to go and another - Sir Anthony Meyer - who ran as a stalking horse against her. It was Geoffrey Howe and not Michael Heseltine who brought her low.
It was Lib Dem MPs who were at the time relatively junior - Sarah Teather, Ed Davey and Michael Moore - who forced Charles Kennedy out.
The men or women, who may bring Gordon Brown down, are probably speaking to very few people now. It is the job of journalists to look for them but it is also our job to report the difference between talk and action.
Listen very hard this morning for what Jack Straw is and isn't saying. The justice secretary has not called on the Labour Party to back Gordon Brown. Indeed he has not uttered any words himself at all since the Glasgow by-election.
Instead, allies of Mr Straw have said that he is urging rebels to "calm down". What that means is that he is asking for MPs who are pressuring him to bring about a change of leadership to ponder on the problems that would cause.
Firstly, it would be divisive. Secondly, the public might not like a party looking inward at the very time the voters want their concerns to be the top of the agenda. Finally though, and most importantly, Mr Straw has warned colleagues that a change of leader would trigger demands for an early general election for which Labour is particularly badly prepared at the moment.
It's interesting too to note that David Blunkett talked of there being no mechanism for removing Mr Brown today. I am not suggesting that Messrs Straw and Blunkett are secretly plotting against Mr Brown but what's clear is that they have not rushed to a full-throated declaration of approval either.
It's a defeat which changes everything and yet also changes nothing.
The voters of Glasgow East have proved beyond any doubt that there is now no safe haven for Gordon Brown from the winds of political change. Even in a so-called heartland area, even in an area of poverty and deprivation, even in Scotland, voters turned out to give him and his government a kicking.
This, though, is merely the latest installment of an electoral revolt which has been seen in the local elections, in London, in Crewe and Nantwich and, of course, in the opinion polls.
So far, there's been a call for a leadership contest but no significant figure has called for Gordon Brown to go. Indeed he's been backed by some formerly strident critics.
Though many in Labour - from the bottom of the party to the very top of the cabinet - have reached the conclusion they'd be better off without Mr Brown - they have also concluded that removing him could look recklessly indulgent, would certainly be bloody and would lead to demands for a swift general election the party would almost certainly lose. Thus, a challenge is likely to require another trigger.
This should give Gordon Brown time at his party conference, and in the run-up to it, to unveil more of the help he is promising for so-called "hard pressed families" and to warn, as he did today, of the risks to them of a Tory government.
The prime minister urged his party to be confident. They may soon demand some proof that he's not a man simply shouting at the wind.
It's morning after a terrible Glaswegian night before for the Labour Party. Gordon Brown will not be the only one who woke today with a very sore political head. The voters of Glasgow East have ensured that nowhere can now be called a safe Labour seat.
Overnight, a Labour majority of over 13,500 in Labour's formerly third safest seat in Scotland, and its 25th safest seat in the UK, simply vanished.
On polling day, the Westminster village - politicians and journalists alike - had convinced itself that Labour would just squeak home.
What's more, the collective mood was that it was time for the summer break, that the fate of the prime minister could wait until we all gathered again in the run-up for the conference season. Many, therefore, will have been shocked by the news they awoke to this morning. That means that what follows next is completely unpredictable.
Gordon Brown at least has an opportunity in the speech he gives today to describe how he plans to get himself, and his party, out of the hole they find themselves in. As he does, Labour MPs will be pondering whether their prospects are better with him or without. They will have the summer to debate, to discuss, to plot their next moves.
I began a spot of moonlighting presenting the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning. Feeling pretty smug at not messing up I emerged from the studio to be told that I'd spent the whole of a discussion about a possible cure for cancer referring to prostrate instead of prostate cancer. One e-mailer has already quipped that my new disease is presumably caught from too much lying down. No, it comes from getting up much much too early.
Lucky I'm not giving up the day job.
PS. You can watch Evan Davis and me reviewing today's programme here.
Consider. Two stories. One day.
Story One - Government to propose "revolutionary" benefit changes.
Story Two - Unemployment could hit two million.
There is, we are told, a new political consensus on the need for tough love to get people off welfare and into work, and the need to spend now to save later. The economics, on the other hand, couldn't be less propitious for such a change - jobs will be closing, welfare rolls expanding and public spending squeezed.
What's more, Incapacity Benefit claims have remained stubbornly high despite a series of ministers - Tory and Labour - promising to bring them down. There are a series of perverse incentives which have made it hard for them to bring about change:
"Them fiscul rools" is not a phrase heard often down the "Dog and Duck". No matter. The rewriting of the rules flourished so often by Gordon Brown to prove his prudence will have a real impact on the man and woman in the pub or at the water-cooler.
It will make it easier for the government to justify not putting up our taxes in the year to come and almost inevitable that they'll have to rise after that.
No wonder an economist told David Cameron at a Tory economic summit yesterday that "the next election is the one to lose".
The rule that matters in this story is the one that places a self-imposed limit on the amount the government can borrow. This year it's sure to be broken because the flow of taxes into the Treasury's coffers is drying up and they have nothing saved for this very rainy day.
Ministers could hike taxes to deal with the problem. They could slash spending. They prefer, of course, to borrow more. Rewriting the rules will allow them to do just that.
They will, of course, argue that there's an economic case for not taking money out of people's pockets or cutting public spending at a difficult time. This will be countered by those who say it is the job of the Bank of England using interest rates to ensure that the economy's not too hot and not too cold but just right.
This news poses real questions for all the parties:
Are Labour prepared to keep borrowing regardless of the fact that one day we'll all have to pick up the tab? Or could Alastair Darling behave as former Chancellors Ken Clarke and Roy Jenkins did - putting up taxes because they believed it was the economically right thing to do at the obvious political cost?
Will the Tories now make the case for a potentially unpopular combination of tax rises and spending cuts rather than the vote garnering tax cuts and spending rises?
Can the Lib Dems plausibly criticise the government for behaving as if there's "a pot of gold" to pay for tax cuts whilst themselves promising to cut the overall tax burden?
These are changed times, interesting times, defining times.
That, quite fairly, is the question ministers ask whenever the Opposition parties so much hint at tax cuts. Today's postponement of the rise in fuel duty is just that - a tax cut. It's cost the Treasury more than £1billion. This follows hot on the heels of the £2.7 billion tax cut designed to buy off the 10p tax revolt.
Now, you might say, isn't the government getting a lot more cash in the form of oil tax revenues? The answer's yes but much of what they gain in oil tax they lose in VAT and corporation tax. They're also due to lose billions in stamp duty and corporation tax.
Someone will have to pay unless the government extends borrowing again. One of the big stories of the next 12 months will be the battle about who should ay and how much.
You can watch me on The Daily Politics show with analysis of the Prime Minister's Questions with presenters Andrew Neil and Liz Mackean. Dawn Butler and Iain Duncan Smith join in the discussion.
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