IF BRIAN Cowen thinks that it cannot get any worse, he should take time out from his misery to look at Gordon Brown, the British prime minister who is being extracted slowly and painfully from Downing Street.

Political careers end in failure, but they need not end in humiliation. Brown is being stripped of all dignity as his ministers resign and his backbenches revolt, but he clings to office like the drowning man that he is.

Cowen, as tough, as stubborn and almost as convinced of his own self-worth as Brown is, heads inexorably towards a similar fate. Cowen can hunt for positives in these election results -- or, more accurately, negatives that are not quite as bad as he feared -- but there are none that offset the damage that they have inflicted on him.

Cowen came to power as a Fianna Fail hero, a man who trumpeted loyalty above all else. A year later he has brought his beloved party to its lowest ebb, trailing Fine Gael by up to 10 points across the country and almost suffering the ignominy of falling below the Labour Party in popular support.

There is mass dissatisfaction with his Government, and a clear majority now want a general election this year. The people want him to go, and tomorrow would not be soon enough.

The message for his Green Party partners is equally clear: no matter what the parliamentary party might think, rank and file Green Party voters are deeply dissatisfied with the Government in which they serve and they, too, want an election -- even though they must know that the Greens would be punished at the polls for this Government's mistakes.

The results will not be as seismic as some had hoped (or feared), but they are still stunning. Fine Gael is now the most popular party in the country and Labour is snapping at Fianna Fail's heels for second place. Enda Kenny lacks majority endorsement as the next Taoiseach, but he is way ahead of Cowen in the people's estimation.

Kenny stumbled, badly, in the final week of the campaign by allowing his party to be associated with Sinn Fein, an error that cast further doubt on his judgement and may have cost votes. He will never enjoy universal popularity -- he is simply too wooden, too ponderous for that -- but it is a true measure of Cowen's busted flush that Kenny outpoints him by 35 per cent to 23 per cent as the people's choice to be the next Taoiseach, and a measure of Kenny's continuing struggle that 37 per cent want neither man to lead.

There is no doubt that a general election would put Fine Gael and Labour into government, and there is no doubt that that is what a vast majority of people want. George Lee's emphatic victory shows, too, that people crave new blood over the tired old family dynasties and long-term political apparatchiks. Lee had celebrity status, but he came across as honest, committed, untainted and angry -- qualities that chimed perfectly with the public mood.

Today, we will discover the depth of Cowen's humiliation in Dublin, with Sinn Fein poised to knock out Eoin Ryan in the reduced three-seat European constituency and threatening, too, to overtake Fianna Fail on first-preference votes. In the rest of Leinster, Liam Aylward, too, looks vulnerable if transfers and the timing of eliminations and surplus distributions fall the way of Fine Gael's John Paul Phelan. Fianna Fail's Brian Crowley should be safe (not so Pat The Cope Gallagher), according to the RTE/Sunday Independent exit poll, but even their local popularity has not protected them from the surge in anti-Government feeling.

In the local elections, tallymen predict total Fianna Fail losses of up to 40 seats, a result that was unthinkable after the last local elections in 2004, when the party was trounced. The Greens, too, will lose seats, even though they have few to lose, and they will barely trouble the vote-counters in the European elections. If John Gormley, the Greens' leader, was capable of humility, he would be a deeply troubled man.

Like Cowen, he has led his party towards electoral oblivion, trading principle for power and hoping that his party could replace the now defunct Progressive Democrats as the glue in future governments of any hue. That, however, will require Gormley to hold on to his party's seats in the next general election: if it were held next week, he would be lucky to retain two out of the six.

Before the elections, Cowen announced that the results would have no impact on him. No matter what the people said, he would soldier on. This Government, we were told, would last its full term and nothing the people said on June 5 would change that.

The Greens, however, were a bit flakier.

Gormley and Eamon Ryan, the Minister for Energy, want to stay in power but they know how to prepare an escape route. A mid-term renegotiation of their programme for government with Fianna Fail, mooted in the weeks before the elections, offers cover for a retreat from Government that could be cloaked with principle, however threadbare.

The elections will have spooked the Greens even more. Dan Boyle, the party chairman and one of its best-known public figures, has picked up a derisory vote in the European elections, according to our exit poll.

Cowen may be determined to brazen through, but his fate is no longer his own to command. He can no longer be certain of the Greens and he must look with increasing suspicion at his own backbenches and, before too long, at his own ministers. Although Cowen demands loyalty, he does not command it: his inner circle is a collection of cronies, rather than an amalgam of the best brains in his party, his style is abrasive and, far more importantly, his results have been appalling.

He is not as deeply disliked as Gordon Brown -- Brown's political career has been built on treachery and tribalism -- but he has become as great a liability. Like Brown, who laid the foundations for Britain's economic collapse during his 10 years of tax-and-spend socialism at the Exchequer, Cowen has not been able to shake free from the blame that must attach to his term as Minister for Finance.

His sluggish response to the economic disaster that was unfolding in front of him last year was caused in large part by the legacy factor: any appropriate response to the crisis would be taken as an admission of his own failure as a minister. Neither he nor Brown were big enough to accept that they had made serious mistakes, and both will pay the ultimate political price for that failure.

The elections show that the people do not believe, and do not want to hear, that our problems have been foisted on us by a global recession. We know that our specific problems have been caused by Government policies that bloated the public pay roll and made the business of government ever more expensive, sclerotic and inefficient.

Cowen talked more about reform and value than any other minister, and did nothing about either. As Taoiseach he devoted his early weeks to a patronising campaign on the Lisbon treaty, and then disappeared for the summer. On his return he agreed a 6 per cent pay increase for the public sector over the next 23 months, on top of the 2 per cent increase that had already been paid in September. That was his considered response to the fast-erupting crisis in the public finances: hand over yet more cash to the trade unions and their members.

Since then Cowen has been fighting shadows, and losing. His early Budget was a disaster, his emergency one a damp squib. He has sought cuts in public spending without bothering to reform the system, so his cuts fall most savagely on services, and his idea of a stimulus is to increase taxes so that consumer spending and consumer confidence plummet. And, since September, the running sore has been the banks, with Cowen consistently on the back foot, reacting to events and seemingly out-thought and out-manoeuvred at every significant turn by the bankers. It is hardly surprising, then, that the electorate have spoken and passed harsh judgement on him, and no less surprising that he will try not to listen.

So what happens next?

A Government without support limps into the summer recess and hopes to emerge at the other end without shipping any further damage. At a point in our history when the Government needs to be decisive, tough and imaginative, it is shorn of credibility. It cannot be forced from office by the Opposition parties, but it can be undone by the Greens and by its own backbenches.

Micheal Martin, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, said yesterday that there would be no challenge to Cowen's leadership. He cannot be sure of that: Fianna Fail is being hollowed out by Cowen, and the longer he leads the party, the worse it will get. But if Fianna Fail cannot save itself, the pressure mounts on the Greens to do to Cowen what the Progressive Democrats should have done to Bertie Ahern: dump him, fast, before he does for them what Ahern did to the PDs.