If a week is truly a long time in politics, a couple of months can feel like a lifetime. During the days of Tony Blair's long goodbye - was it really so recent? - we heard a great deal from some of the people around him about the terrible risk represented by Gordon Brown.

Too dour, too Scottish, too familiar, too flawed and certainly incapable, they said, of dealing with young, smooth and eloquent David Cameron. If Brown couldn't nail a by-election in his Dunfermline backyard, and if he was incapable of preventing the SNP from snatching Scotland, where would he lead Labour at Westminster, if not to disaster?

Those tongues have ceased to wag, at least for now. Brown has deprived them of the excuse. His "bounce", as they call it, has been impressive. He has won back all the ground lost by Tony Blair, as measured by the polls, and built up a comfortable lead over Cameron. The Tory leader has seemed unable to deal confidently with one of his own disloyal candidates, far less with the Prime Minister.

This state of affairs need not endure, but it is hard to see what might bring it to a close. Even Brown's clumsy handling of the aftermath of the English floods has done him no real harm, given that Cameron has seemed still more inept. In America and in Europe, the Prime Minister has looked statesmanlike and substantial. The Tory has sounded like a man begging for attention.

Such is the fate of all opposition leaders, perhaps, but Cameron's case is more serious than most. If he fails, what remains for his party? Still another fresh face? Another old hand to steady the ship? A lurch to the left, a lurch back to the right? A second chance for William Hague? Every answer sounds daft or desperate. The real interest now is not whether but when Brown will decide to finish off the glib Etonian.

We hear that he wants a mandate, so called, of his own. If so, it will not be because he believes that his rise to the top was somehow illegitimate as Tories, strangely forgetful, have tried to claim. Political history is littered with the names of those who entered No 10 without benefit of a general election. It may strike some voters as odd, or even wrong (though the polls suggest otherwise), but there is nothing new about it.

Brown probably does not want to be defined in terms of Blair's alleged legacy, but who would? Guilt by association is never pleasant. More likely, however, is the idea that the new Prime Minister simply wants to guarantee time for the tasks he has set himself. So why not claim the right when the Tories are weak and apparently bereft of strategies? It's logical. It's politics. It would be stranger by far if Brown decided to wait until 2010, as is his right.

A snap election, then? This week, for reasons approaching the inexplicable, October has been discussed. This is no doubt an effect of life in the Westminster village, where the hinterland the rest of us know as Britain is too often forgotten. Cameron is ripe for clobbering; therefore the big clunking fist will swing into action. Simple.

Simple but silly. It would be silly, for one thing, for Brown to give the impression that he is in some sort of desperate rush. It would be silly, even given the advantages granted to Labour by the electoral system, to mistake poll leads ranging from three to six points for an unassailable margin. It would be silly to forget that the party remains £25m in debt. And it would be very silly to overlook the fact, as is the perennial habit of the Westminster village, that Scotland still poses certain problems for Brown. He will have made no such mistake.

Still, there is no denying that Cameron looks increasingly like a chicken ready for plucking. By all accounts his own party, baffled by the row over grammar schools, among other things, has begun to turn against him. He still lacks a coherent set of policies. Brown may wait, but he will not wait forever.

I'm guessing, though the thought is hardly original, that we could be back in the polling booths next May. The Prime Minister will then be able to boast about that 2p income tax "cut" of his. The situation in Iraq as it affects British troops may be clarified, if not resolved. Brown's new team will have had time, if they have applied themselves, to rebuild a creaking party organisation. And Labour in Scotland might finally have managed to pull itself together.

In that regard, "might" is the important word. Jack McConnell will be gone by the autumn, so we are assured, perhaps to take up the peerage that Blair is rumoured to have offered. A new Scottish leader - Wendy Alexander, if Brown has his way - would be well-established by May (though not by October). With luck, some of the shine might have come off Alex Salmond's SNP by the spring. Might.

How badly did Labour do in the Scottish elections? Or rather, how well did the SNP fare? For the former to become merely Scotland's second party after so many decades was clearly a historic setback. But to be edged out by a single seat in shambolic elections, with tens of thousands disenfranchised, can be made to seem less than catastrophic. Labour is in poor shape in Scotland, but it is far from finished.

Salmond could equally well assert that he has barely started. Our new Edinburgh administration has been dextrous in its handling of minority government. A situation that should have been a problem for the Nationalists has proven more difficult for opposition parties. Too often they have struggled to know how to react even to Salmond's rhetoric. If he spends the winter doing no more than failing to alienate the populace, a May general election could still pose a challenge for Brown.

It will be resolved with the answer to an old question: how far do Scottish voting habits diverge when different legislatures are at stake? Will those who switched to the SNP in Scotland's election stay switched? Or will they decide, as in the past, on horses for courses, and recognise the Westminster contest as a different sort of race? If Scots who voted Nationalist in the Holyrood poll stick with the SNP we will be in genuinely new territory. If they prefer the old pick and mix, Brown will be home and dry.

The strange, slow death of British Conservatism will then continue. This is not a party psychologically prepared for a decade and a half, or more, out of office. As a matter of historical fact, the erstwhile "most successful election-winning machine in Europe" has no experience of such a calamity. But for how much longer can it continue to throw leader after leader against the barbed wire?

As this column has remarked more than once down the years, it is not actually compulsory for Britain to possess a Tory Party. The Liberals withered almost to nothing, once upon a time. Things and countries change. Amid it all Gordon Brown must still wonder how much Scotland has changed.