I argued in my post Election fever last week that Britain doesn’t need an election and the prime minister shouldn’t have the right to choose its timing.

This week, it has become increasingly clear that Gordon Brown has got his tactics badly wrong. He’s backed himself into a corner. By allowing speculation about an election to run out of control, he has created the situation in which he has to call an election – or risk appearing to run away from the challenge.

In just a few days, David Cameron has gone from a leader on the slide to one with renewed authority. If Brown doesn’t call an election, Cameron will taunt Brown mercilessly.

It needn’t have been like this. Labour could have said weeks – months – ago that there would be no election. That the party had a clear mandate and work to do. Few would have quarrelled – the country is hardly clamouring for a poll.

I suspect the reason for Labour’s blunder is that Brown is genuinely uncertain what to do. It’s in his character: shades of his failure to stand as Labour leader after John Smith’s death in 1994. No doubt he’d love to win an election in his own right. But he must be agonising over the appalling prospect of a humiliating defeat just months after arriving at the pinnacle of British public life.

Brown may, of course, still triumph in an early poll. But he’d do well to remember the cautionary example of John Major.  Major, like Brown, was the uncharismatic successor to a dominant leader: Margaret Thatcher. The country warmed to Major after the strident Thatcher years. He won a famous, surprise victory in the 1992 general election. But his triumph soon turned to dust. Within months the government was in turmoil as Britain crashed out of the European exchange rate system. Major and the Conservatives never recovered.

In short, an election win is just the start, rather than an end in itself. Another lesson for Gordon to ponder as he makes his mind up.

Postscript: Jim Callaghan’s election blunder

Many have quoted recently the example of Jim Callaghan’s fatal decision to delay his only election from the autumn of 1978 to the following spring. But few remember now that Callaghan made things far worse by making a great joke of it at the 1978 TUC conference:

The commentators have fixed the month for me, they have chosen the date and the day. But I advise them: "Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched." Remember what happened to Marie Lloyd. She fixed the day and the date, and she told us what happened. As far as I remember it went like this: ‘There was I, waiting at the church–’ (laughter). Perhaps you recall how it went on. ‘All at once he sent me round a note. Here’s the very note. This is what he wrote: "Can’t get away to marry you today, my wife won’t let me."’ Now let me just make clear that I have promised nobody that I shall be at the altar in October? Nobody at all."