NOW the British government has been abandoned by its core supporters, all sides of the Labour Party have lost faith in their leader.

As Labour MPs and party workers came to terms with their disastrous by-election result in Crewe and Nantwich last week, it was striking how calmly many reacted to a political earthquake that ranked 10 on the Westminster Richter Scale.

It must have been truly galling for Labour diehards to see David Cameron and the successful Tory candidate Edward Timpson lapping up the adulation during a mid-morning victory parade in Crewe marketplace, amid a sea of blue balloons and Timpson posters.

At the same time, Gordon Brown -- looking tired despite having gone to bed at Number 10 well before the appalling Crewe result came through at 3am -- was having to fend off questions back in London about whether he could survive as Prime Minister until the next election.

Rather than address the issue, or admit that he had taken a pasting, he said only that voters were sending a message that they wanted him to steer the country through "difficult economic times".

It was Mr Brown at his evasive best. Hours earlier Labour voters, among them many former railwaymen who had hated Margaret Thatcher and vowed never to vote Conservative as long as they lived (they blamed her for the loss of 10,000 jobs in the railway yards), had switched directly to the new-look Tories.

This was no normal by-election jolt in which a disgruntled electorate registered easy protests against the governing party. The people of Crewe deserted en masse and directly to the former enemy, by-passing the normal repository for protest votes in by-elections, the Lib Dems.

Crewe and Nantwich 2008 was a stunning and angry statement by ordinary working-class people of their willingness to break traditional family loyalties stretching back generations -- and their desire to look for a new political home with the previously detested Conservatives.

Yet while Mr Cameron sensed the implications of a momentous change -- vindication, no less, for his modernisation strategy -- and spoke of "a very special feeling", many Labour people were more numb than shocked.

"What else did you expect?" snapped one senior Labour adviser, as she went through the figures. A 17.6 per cent swing from Labour straight to the Tories. A safe 7,078 majority turned overnight into one of 7,860 for the Conservatives in a Labour heartland. The worst by-election result for Labour for more than three decades.

"I am not shocked at all after what has been happening," she added. "The only slight surprise to me is that the Lib Dems did not perform a bit better. But the rest was entirely predictable."

All the post-results patter on the radio and television stations, from the likes of ministers Harriet Harman and Ed Balls, who both suggested Labour had merely hit a bump in the road but still had the best driver in Gordon Brown, meant nothing.

No one really believed it. "Did you hear all that drivel?" said one Labour MP in disbelief.

Within hours of the Tories' thumping victory being announced, there were some very public recriminations. The centre-left pressure group Compass, which has 40 Labour MPs as members, issued a withering statement about the direction of policy under Gordon Brown.

It condemned the government's "serial mistakes", its "failure to develop a convincing political narrative" and its "inept" campaign in Crewe and Nantwich, with its "anti-toff" tactics and (what it claimed were) racist undertones against the Polish immigrant population.

Compass concluded that the once brilliantly successful New Labour approach of trying to appeal to both the core vote and the middle classes at the same time, had had its day. New Labour "triangulation", it said, was "dead". Graham Stringer, a former government whip, went for broke, calling on Cabinet ministers to force Mr Brown out: "Without that, we are heading for electoral disaster at the next general election."

But, for the most part, Labour MPs -- even those among the hundred or so with majorities less than the late Gwyneth Dunwoody's in Crewe and Nantwich -- were paralysed by gloom, and an inability to see short-term solutions.

Another Labour MP summed up the mood. "We are pretty f-----. There is no doubt about that. But an election challenge to Gordon would rip this party apart. The last thing we want to be seen as is divided, as well as useless. If people see the party ripping itself apart we really would be finished."

For several weeks the Labour Party has resembled a clinically depressed patient for whom not even the best clinicians can find a cure. Ministers, Labour MPs, aides at the heart of things at Number 10, all know the problem -- but hard as they try they cannot find the answer. "It is a question of what the hell do we do," said one party worker.

Labour's difficulty is that, less than a year after it chose a leader in Gordon Brown who it thought would outmanoeuvre David Cameron, show him up for lack of experience, and steer the party with great confidence and assurance towards a fourth election victory, it has all gone terribly wrong.

Circumstances -- the faltering economy chief among them -- and Mr Brown's acute difficulties in articulating a clear vision, communicating in a natural and relaxed manner with the public, and running effective Number 10 and Labour Party operations, have changed all that.

In the House of Commons, Labour MPs from all wings of the party have lost faith in Mr Brown as the opinion polls have seen the party slump from 11 points ahead of the Tories last September to around 20 points behind now. On May 1 catastrophic losses in council and London elections destroyed what was left of morale.

Some of the unions have begun to turn against Brown, seeing him now as no more attuned to their interests than was Tony Blair.

But the malaise runs deeper than policy errors and disagreements over strategy. If these were the sum total of Labour's problems, its MPs and workers would still believe Mr Brown could turn it round. They are not.

Many party malcontents look at the way Number 10 has become a hotbed of factional infighting, and how the Labour Party is approaching bankruptcy, with donations almost 40 per cent down on a year ago, as money piles up in the Tory party's bank account. They look enviously at Lord Ashcroft pumping millions into Conservative target seats, with proof of the Ashcroft strategy's success being the result in Crewe and Nantwich. They see how for weeks Labour has been unable to find a general secretary willing to manage an organisation with more than £20m (€25m) of debt.

David Pitt-Watson, a wealthy figure in the City chosen to do the job a couple of months of ago, had a blazing row with Mr Brown when he asked for legal protection because he feared being held personally liable if the party went broke.

After failing to negotiate a deal he was happy with, he decided not to take the post.

All of which points to the core of the matter -- the prime minister himself -- and a sense that the operation he leads is now dysfunctional. Mr Brown, MPs hear, reacts to the endless stream of bad news by working ever deeper into the night, afflicted by darker and darker moods.

Even some of his closest aides are said to have lost belief that their master can turn things around. Inside the Downing Street bunker Stephen Carter, Mr Brown's new political adviser, is still struggling to impose his authority. He is said to have been appalled by Labour's "class war" campaign in Crewe and Nantwich, which saw Mr Timpson branded an upper-class twit. But the campaign team on the ground, led by Labour MP Stephen McCabe, pressed ahead anyway.

Tellingly, on Thursday the BBC struggled to find a single minister willing to come on to its late-night election programme to defend the lost cause. In the end, the job was done by one of the most junior government members, Chris Bryant, the plucky parliamentary aide to Harriet Harman. Some MPs, former ministers and their aides are vitriolic. "The problem with Gordon is nobody likes him. If you make so many enemies on the way up, not many people will come to your rescue on the way down," said one aide.

As it stands, few MPs seriously entertain the idea of a formal leadership challenge against Mr Brown in the short or medium term, largely because there is no candidate yet willing to step forward and risk his or her career. Anyone wanting to trigger a contest would need the backing of 20 per cent of the Parliamentary Labour Party -- 72 MPs -- to pass first base. The field would then be thrown open.

The oft-quoted young pretenders who certainly want the top job one day -- David Miliband (42) and James Purnell (38) -- will both fear dividing a party that would afterwards be so split that it would almost certainly crash to a heavy election defeat and be out of office for a decade.

From the older corner of the party, Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary and Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, are seen by some as possible caretaker leaders, though neither would launch a strike against Mr Brown.

Beneath the fog of indecision, however, there is another scenario gaining currency. It is that Mr Brown be given until the end of July to prove himself and restore morale. If by then things have not improved, ministers, MPs and influential figures in the unions believe the only solution may be to send a delegation of his closest political friends -- perhaps including Ed Balls, the Education Secretary, and Douglas Alexander, the International Development Secretary -- to urge him to go.

Cabinet ministers have been on the phone to each other, trying to determine what the "save Gordon strategy" might be. But several of them wonder if the Prime Minister's fortunes can be turned round -- given the difficult weeks ahead. Next month he faces a Labour rebellion over plans to increase the time terror suspects can be held without charge from 28 to 42 days. His difficulties will be compounded by a wave of public sector strikes by teachers, firemen and college lecturers.

"Lots of us think some delegation in the future may be the only way to do things -- to give him two months and then send in the friends in grey suits if it hasn't worked," said a senior party aide.

But even this would be a cruel and difficult procedure, with no guarantee of success. Brown, said the aide, was a big beast and a fighter who would be difficult to dislodge.

"It would be like a bullfight where the bull has had the first dagger stuck in his back. There would be blood everywhere, but it would be far from certain he would lie down and die."

© Telegraph

- Toby Helm