"So at last, Tony Blair steps out to the drumbeat of history-in-the-making. And is that the gallows' cry for William Hague?"
That's how we commenced our coverage of the British election on the morning after Mr Blair announced his June 7th date with destiny. As the campaign comes to its close - and the politicians make way for the people - there seems little need of other introduction. For nothing, it appears, has changed in the intervening 26 days.
Mr Blair, Mr Hague and Mr Kennedy criss-crossed Britain yesterday, in a final frantic bid to mobilise core support, soundbiting to the last.
But for all the tumult of the campaign - the unscheduled encounters with real people, not to mention the multi-million pound expenditure on broadcasts and poster campaigns, the endless hours of television and radio punditry, the acres of newsprint devoted to news and analysis - the settled will of the British people seems as clear as at the outset.
The Conservative leader vows to leave us all surprised tomorrow morning. If he proves true to his word, none will be more so than the army of pollsters and marketing experts making unplanned application for placement on one of Chancellor Gordon Brown's New Deal welfare-to-work schemes.
No: the expectation is that shortly after 10 o'clock tonight the exit polls will bring confident prediction of Mr Blair's triumphant return to 10 Downing Street and Labour's unprecedented second full term.
The final polls yesterday failed to inject any last-gasp excitement. True, Mr Blair came tops in one he would rather have lost. According to readers of the women's magazine That's Life, the prime minister is well ahead in the mendacity league, with 45 per cent of those surveyed considering him "the biggest liar of all politicians". But for the nervous spin-meisters at Millbank that, at least, was balanced by the fact that Mr Blair emerged clear winner in the bedroom stakes. Given the choice, two-thirds said they would choose Mr Blair rather than Mr Hague.
The poll that mattered, ICM's for the Guardian, showed the Conservatives slashing Labour's lead by a whole eight points in the last week. The switch of focus from saving the pound to bursting Mr Blair's bubble appeared to have worked a trick. Even so, with Conservative headline support seemingly stuck at 32 per cent, ICM still projected a majority for Mr Blair of between 170 and 190 seats - in other words, a landslide on similar scale to that of 1997.
With no evidence of a seismic shift, that left Mr Hague pinning his hopes on his party's performance in its 180 target seats, the secret army of Tory voters who won't declare themselves to the pollsters, and the apathetic in the Labour heartlands who might yet undermine the strength of Mr Blair's expected mandate.
The established wisdom, articulated by the Economist weeks ago, is that the Conservatives simply had the wrong policies and the wrong leader. Hagueites would point to polling evidence that the Tories would not have fared any better under any of the alternatives. And Mr Hague himself would dispute suggestions that he has failed to engage with the issues across the board.
There have been oddities, for sure. Little has really been made of law and order, despite the fact that violent crime has risen under Labour. The Tory leader might have expected greater benefit from his opposition to the euro, given that this is the one issue on which he finds resonance with majority British opinion. And Mr Portillo put Mr Blair and Mr Brown on the defensive over the £5 billion "black hole" in their spending plans, and their alleged intention to hit the middle classes with more "stealth" taxes by lifting the ceiling on employees' National Insurance contributions.
Mr Hague might also have thought to be helped by some remarkable "events" during the campaign itself. Four years ago, Labour memorably told voters they had just "24 hours" in which to save the National Health Service. In the last four weeks they have been lambasted over "Third World" standards in health care. Consultants threaten to set themselves up in the equivalent of barristers' chambers and sell their services back to the state system. GPs threaten en masse resignation if dissatisfied with their new contract. And in his BBC Newsnight interview with the brilliant Jeremy Paxman on Monday night, Mr Blair rather unconvincingly implied voters hadn't taken literally New Labour's manifesto commitment to transform the health service within five years.
New Jerusalem was never going to be built in one parliamentary term. And it seems clear that, some time back, the punters decided to give Mr Blair a second in which to prove his promise. If that decision was foretold by the 1997 landslide, it was arguably rooted in the 1992 victory many rueful Tories now wish John Major had never won.
One consolation for the Conservatives may be that next time Labour will be forced to campaign against its own record, not theirs. The consolation for Mr Hague might be that - provided he avoids complete meltdown - he may yet hang on to his job, if only because no one else wants it.