So, at last, Tony Blair steps out to the drumbeat of history-in-the-making. And is that the gallows' cry for William Hague?
Political journalists groan at the prospect of an election campaign whose outcome appears all but preordained even as they eagerly look forward to election night itself. For this election undoubtedly has the capacity to radically alter the state of British politics and, in its aftermath, to redefine the British state itself.
Curious, then, the lack of public excitement attending Mr Blair's announcement yesterday; as palpable almost as the relief among his high command at the spectacle of the Prime Minister, foot-and-mouth crisis behind him, resuming the all-important quest for Labour's unprecedented second full term in power.
Newspapers may report their latest opinion poll findings in terms of a continuing love-affair between Mr Blair and the great British public. But Mr Blair and his strategists seem to have divined a somewhat different message.
As he prepared for his audience with Queen Elizabeth yesterday morning, Britons awoke to the news that Mr Blair had ordered ministers to show "hunger" and "humility." At a glance, that would seem no more than common-sense presentation and planning.
No party, however strong its lead, can appear to take the electorate for granted. Labour has a nagging fear of alienation, or at any rate indifference, in its traditional heartlands. They also fear apathy might just prove Mr Hague's best bet for a breathtaking upset.
The injunction to modesty, moreover, would not be out of place for a party which entered government in 1997 after 18 years in the wilderness and very quickly got a reputation for arrogance.
However, the Prime Minister was almost certainly addressing a problem which runs deeper than the self-satisfied air of some ministers. For alongside alienation and indifference, Mr Blair's government is beset by a high level of cynicism born, in part at least, of its tendency to inflate its own achievements.
Some New Labourites drew no obvious conclusions from the fact that Mr Blair was elected in 1997 by the votes of just one-third of the British people, and by less than John Major five years earlier.
Some of them seem similarly reluctant to take any message from predictions that turnout this time might be at an all-time low; instead attributing the public's lack of excitement to what they call "the politics of contentment".
But the canny Mr Blair is having none of it. Not for nothing has he told them to fight the election "as if it is on a knife-edge". For while the Prime Minister can bank on relatively high levels of contentment - or at least, in areas where that is not forthcoming, confidence and trust - he knows that Labour hasn't managed yet to change the weather.
Hence the need, acknowledged by the Health Secretary, Mr Alan Milburn, to enthuse voters about Labour's promise to further reform and invest in the vital public services on the back of the government's reputation for economic competence. In an echo of last time, schools and hospitals are to be the main beneficiaries of Labour-provided economic stability.
In 1997 New Labour's theme song promised Things can only get better. In 2001 the party's "modest" acknowledgement is that they have a lot more to do before people have the health and education systems and transport services they desire.
So "unfinished business" and "work in progress" have emerged as early themes of Labour's campaign. The message is simple: the Tories had 18 years in which to leave their mark on Britain and, while the Labour government has made a good start at tackling all the problems caused by "chronic under-investment", Mr Blair now needs a second term in which to make good his promise. It is a message to which the electorate appears receptive.
Mr Blair's biggest adventure has been in the field of constitutional reform. There may be battles to come over the Barnet funding formula, and the so-called West Lothian Question conspicuously remains unresolved.
However, the transition to devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (structurally, at least, although David Trimble appears to have plunged the peace process into an election crisis) has gone remarkably smoothly.
Sir Edward Heath's avowed determination not to take a peerage following his retirement reflects widespread criticism of Labour's decision to abolish the hereditary peerage while allowing 92 peers to remain, and its failure to follow through on House of Lords reform by creating a directly elected second chamber.
Radical commentators bemoan this, and Labour's failure to entrench the power of the centre left by conceding proportional representation for Westminster elections.
And they find themselves torn between praise for Labour's social policy advances and an illiberal tendency at a Home Office which shows scant regard for civil libertarian concerns or earlier promises to bring the secret state to account, patently still believes prison works and often appears in competition with the Tories to show itself toughest on asylum-seekers.
New Labour ministers - characterised by Mr Hague as a metropolitan elite - would probably level the same charge at those media backers who agonise about their apparent pursuit of the Daily Mail agenda, seemingly unaware of the resonance its law-and-order stance finds in sink housing estates across the country.
Into the Labour heartlands ministers will now carry the message of the New Deal, taking young people off welfare into work, the minimum wage, augmented incomes for the working poor, increased pensions targeted first at those most in need, improved performances in primary schools. And the promise of more to come, courtesy of the biggest of all New Labour's first-term achievements.
If it's still "the economy, stupid", then the Conservatives would seem to be nowhere. The mantle of economic competence fell from their grasp on that fateful day in September 1992 which saw Britain leave the European exchange rate mechanism.
No matter that the Chancellor, Mr Gordon Brown, merely continued the policy thereafter forced on John Major and Kenneth Clarke. No matter they bequeathed the conditions for record lows in inflation, interest rates and unemployment.
The mighty Chancellor might yet regret bombastic talk of having abolished Britain's boom-and-bust, post-war economic cycle. An economic downturn would make more inevitable the already threatened conflict between Labour's commitment to "investment" in the public services and Mr Blair's no-tax-hike compact with Middle England.
But, sufficient unto the day. For now Mr Brown enjoys what the OECD describes as an enviable record. If Mr Brown has not actually mastered the economic cycle, he has achieved that which eluded all Labour chancellors before him - bringing the economic and electoral cycles into kilter.
As Peter Mandelson marvels in a hymn of praise for his one-time friend: "There has been no 1976 IMF crisis, no 1966-67 devaluation crisis, no 1947 convertibility crisis, let alone the collapse of 1931. The stigma of mid-term breakdown that dogged Labour throughout its history has finally been banished."
That is why Gordon Brown - not, actually, Alistair Campbell - remains the second most important force in Labour politics. And why the tensions between No 10 Downing Street and No 11, home of Mr Brown - most spectacularly over the future Labour leadership and the pending moment of truth over the euro - will provide the big picture of the seemingly inevitable second term.
Frank Millar is London Editor of The Irish Times