There’s a lot of cross-over between the world of politics and the world of poker. It’s perhaps why I like both almostly equally.

Being successful in Poker demands effortless deception, strategy and the ability to see through your opponents strategies and deceptions. Then you need skill, knowledge and experience – in the case of Poker it’s about understanding probability and specific probabilities. You need a bit of luck too, because to be a real winner in Poker you need to be willing to take risks, to gamble. Finally, you need to exercise enormous self-discipline, because Poker is, at its heart, a game of emotional endurance – a test of who can remain rational and in control the longest.

One of the phenomenons that you see in Poker quite commonly are people who, after being especially unlucky (or especially stupid), go ‘On Tilt’. It means they lose their self control and begin taking pointless and stupid risks. They give up, in effect, and reason that they have nothing to lose – therefore they place their fate in the hands of pure chance in the hope of a miracle.

I wondered if that’s what we’re seeing in the Labour Party right now – a sort of collective madness that’s taken over in their grief and distress at returning to the bad old days of unelectability. It’s a situation that’s arisen from playing the politics game with far too much deception and reliance on chance, and not nearly enough skill or knowledge. They thought they could bluff forever – after all, most people wanted to believe them, especially within the Labour Party itself. Finding out your Government is bluffing when they claim competence and understanding is an unnerving and dislocating experience at the best of times.

But that’s not what we’re seeing. What we’re seeing is the political equivalent of a gambler chasing their losses. Each catastrophe that strikes the Government – and this last month has been one endless nightmare after another – only seems to increase Gordon’s resolve to hang on longer, to give himself time to put right the wrongs and turn things around. Just one more bet, one more really big gamble that can wipe the slate clean! Madness prevails.

Call a General Election now, with Labour at 22%? He won’t do it. He simply can’t accept that he’s utterly and comprehensively beaten, that far from being in credit with the nation he is, morally speaking, in a debt that will take many decades to repay.

Yet the country is experiencing an unprecedented crisis of confidence in the whole system of politics, and my fears of what sort of consequences this will have are making me feel distinctly uneasy – especially after another year of this sort of continuous and relentless negativity surrounding the Government.

The only real way to resolve this mess is to call a General Election, and let individual constituencies decide who should go back into parliament and who shouldn’t. It will allow us to draw a line under this whole affair and move on. The guilty will have been punished and the public’s anger will have been dissipated.

But Brown… and this Government… willing to ‘take one for the team’? Willing to admit that they are beaten, fall on their swords for the good of the whole system of parliamentary democracy in Britain? To, for once, do the decent thing?

I can’t see it happening. Brown’s one and only chance of redeeming himself and the Labour Party as a whole is to call a General Election. If he fails – if he is forced out, forcing the country to endure another year of chasing his losses and indulging his personal desires to remain Prime Minister then this opportunity is lost forever. There will be no redemption, no forgiveness – just decades in the wilderness and, potentially (and realistically) the actual, final end of the Godforsaken Labour Party.