DEFEAT looms for John Major. Despite all the talk of Labour's policy "wobble" last week, that remains the relentless message from the opinion polls. The overwhelming evidence is that it is also the considered view of his own Conservative candidates.
Last night the Prime Minister was forced to address the nation over the head of his warring party. The temptation is to describe this development, two weeks before polling day, as extraordinary. Alas for Mr Major - and as he knows well - it is not. On Europe the Conservatives have steadfastly refused to be the sensible party. And they have refused to be led.
Now, as the election enters the home straight, Mr Major looks to have been cut adrift, left in almost solo battle with Mr Blair's New Labour. Winning the election remains his game plan. His colleagues give every appearance of playing a different game on a different pitch.
He is not entirely alone. Although you can never be certain with this lot, the cabinet line on the single currency seems likely to hold. But that is hardly because members of the cabinet have no interest in that alternative project. To the contrary, the fine calculation must be that an act of disloyalty now could gravely affect chances of the leadership later.
It's about leadership, stupid. And Mr Blair shrewdly and effectively hammered that message home yesterday. Mr Blair's position on the single currency is the same as Mr Major's. Both are committed to participate in the negotiations and to keep their options open. Both have promised a referendum on the back of any cabinet decision to join the currency.
Neither seems to think it likely in the life of the next parliament.
But neither is prepared to rule it out: Both are attended by the suspicion that they know (though they will never say so to the electorate) that, if the currency goes ahead and proves to be a success, Britain will be obliged to join sooner or later.
Mr Blair has had to track Mr Major carefully, pledging to protect the national veto, and declaring a willingness, after all, to be isolated if necessary in the national interest. But Labour has carefully defined the ultimate decision on the single currency as a matter of economic pragmatism. For the Tory party at large, it is a matter of supreme constitutional importance, the likely final step to the European superstate.
Mr Major had, probably still has, hopes of casting Labour as the federalist party. The Social Chapter and the minimum wage are characterised as the return of socialism by the back door. Scottish devolution is raised as the spectre threatening the break up of the United Kingdom, the open door to the Europe of the Regions.
Looking toward the Amsterdam summit just six weeks from polling day, Mr Major last night appealed to voters to trust the man of experience against the rank amateur. But the Prime Minister, like the Tory Central Office officials who dutifully repeated this mantra, looked to be whistling in the wind.
For there was nothing amateurish about Mr Blair yesterday, as he raised the debate above the minutae of the European arguments.
He said Mr Major's failure to sack two junior ministers in open breach of government policy had made him "a laughing stock". Speaking on BBC radio, he said: "The Prime Minister should have kept to his original position, which is that ministers should abide by the government manifesto.
"I think this is a defining moment of the campaign. It shows the divisions are so deep within the Conservative Party that even in an election campaign they are incapable of being led. And if they are incapable of being led they are incapable of forming a government that can press the national interest."
It was a simple and powerful message, dramatically underlined within the hour by Mr Major, as he appealed to his party not to send him "naked into the conference chamber". We can only speculate as to how he will want to play things in the event of defeat.
But the Tories now revolting plainly have no thoughts of sending him anywhere but to the House of Lords and a City boardroom as lucrative reward for past services. Certainly they evince little belief that he can take them to victory.
Indeed the Tory spectacle resembles the flight of US congressional candidates from a no hope presidential runner. The message implicit in their behaviour is that there is no coat tail effect, that there is only personal salvation left.
It is not Mr Major's fault. He was deeply impressive at his press conference yesterday. Some journalists said they had never heard him speak like this before. But he" did. Last November on BBC television. The problem, then as now, is that the country cannot hear him for the sound of battle within his party.
Mr Major retains stubborn belief in the power of his political persona to defy the odds. But there is little beyond the election result in 1992 to sustain him.
Labour's spin doctors repeatedly insist that elections are not determined by the four weeks of a campaign but by the two years before, it. And the Conservative Party seems to have elected to rerun the last two years in the last two weeks of this campaign.