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Everyone has an easy explanation for the coming disaster for Labour in London and the wider South. The party will be hammered because it has taxed the middle classes too hard and wasted too much of their money.
It's a simple argument that fits nearly with Right-wing prejudices. I'm not saying it's all wrong. People complain about taxes with a new vehemence - and I must confess to wondering where my money has gone, too.
The reality is more complicated, however: Gordon Brown is being caught by a pincer movement. It's true that he's losing because increasingly conservative tax payers think he's too Left-wing - but he is also losing because he has failed to be Left-wing enough.
That failure strikes me because I'm from the same political generation as many in the Cabinet. We were brought up with a deep suspicion of financial capitalism. We studied the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, and learned that if governments allowed bankers to run riot, they would bring the roof down.
Yet in power ministers forgot everything they once knew, and allowed bubbles to grow in the City and the housing market. I guess they thought light-touch regulation was a vote winner and believed we would applaud them for letting the markets shoot ever higher.
But even in the good times, they never grasped that the London middle classes deeply disliked the hedge fund managers and nondoms who were pricing them out of property, schools and the higher end of social life.
Now the economy is looking shaky, they don't see that Labour must be ready to help the victims if there is a crash that was not of their making. Their inability to change with the times was well described to me by an economist who went to the Treasury last week.
"Why don't you propose a package to help homeowners who are threatened with repossession?" he asked. "We could have a cooling-off period before lenders seized a house and emergency loans. Even George W Bush is thinking along these lines."
The Treasury mandarins looked at him as if he were mad. Interfere in the housing market? On no account could such sacrilege be contemplated.
Now US attempts to revive their economy may come to nothing. Equally, Alastair Darling may be right when he says that all will be well here. But as a party of the Left, Labour ought to be reassuring voters that it understands the dangers of a banking crisis far better than the Tories. It ought to show it can act now to stop a slowdown turning into a recession.
Instead, a fearful public sees official paralysis and indifference. Even if we are spared the worst, no one will thank the Government for their deliverance.
