Boarding a train at Leicester yesterday evening, I chanced upon and began to flick through a discarded copy of The Times, in which Matthew Parris hammers another nail in Labour’s coffin with forensic precision – pygmies, the lot of ‘em; not a leader worthy of being taken seriously.

This opportunity to change society permanently, lost with breathtaking ineptitude, hypocrisy and arrogance, will not easily or quickly be forgotten by the electorate.  The Labour Party’s coming Wilderness Years will endure quite some time…

[Harman, Blears, Cooper, Balls, Milliband, Cruddas, Mandelson, Johnson...]  Within about a year none of these people will matter. There is hardly a Labour government now and by next summer there won’t be one at all. I could be 75, or dead, by the time the internal politics of the Labour Party are again of much account to the wider world. Soon begin four or five years, or perhaps ten or even fifteen, by the end of which most of the Labour front-rankers we are talking about now will have left politics for business, Europe or the Lords. So we are talking incessantly (and I don’t exclude myself) about a shower of soon-to-be nobodies in a government soon to be terminated. Their future is about as important as was President George W. Bush’s after last November.

In a few months’ time the clocks will go forward and by the time they go forward again Harriet Harman, Yvette Cooper, Ed Balls, the Milibands Ed and David, and Alan Johnson are likely to be no higher on the news agenda than Virginia Bottomley, John Gummer, Norman Fowler or Gillian Shephard were by 1998.

Labour is out of time, out of space, out of ideas, out of puff and shortly to be out of office. Meanwhile, the country is sailing into an economic tempest of unknown ferocity and indefinite duration; we are close to the rocks and there is another crew preparing to take over.

And we are not talking much about the new crew at all. Who are these Conservatives? What are their plans? What are their instincts? What is their calibre? Are they ready?

It doesn’t really matter what Gordon Brown says or does any more. People have stopped looking, stopped listening. Only news of his failures registers easily with the mob – fitting, as it does, that oh-so-Blairite concept: the “narrative” of current affairs.

Once this happens it is almost impossible to claw back the initiative: even economic recovery (John Major found) cannot regain for you the nation’s attention. Nothing is impossible but in politics some things are most unlikely. A political rebirth for Mr Brown’s crew is one of them.

Yet to a very considerable degree the warhorses of our governing Labour Party are shadowed by a cohort of warhorses in the news media who cut our teeth half a generation ago on the collapse of the Tory dispensation and the ascent into the sunlight of its new Labour replacement. The life of this movement and its young creators, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson, has been our professional life too. We are fascinated by the unfolding tragedy of a dream gone sour, by decline and fall.

But is the nation? More to the point, should the nation be? The dear old nation, which, on the whole, dips in and out of politics and takes only a fitful interest in policy, party and personality, is inclined to shrug its shoulders as a government dies. My sense of the national mood is of attention shifting steadily away from the Labour Party and from a generation that it regards as yesterday’s men.

To which you may reply: but surely oppositions matter? What kind of opposition Labour may be poised to become, and who will lead it, and where, could be central even to a Tory story, after May 2010.

I cannot honestly remember how interested we were in the Kremlinology of the Callaghan-led Labour Cabinet in its dying days at the end of the 1970s, but I would agree we should have been. First, it was not so clear, in 1978, that Labour must lose in 1979. Second, although battle-worn and staggering, the previous Labour Government was fizzing and rumbling with big debates, big minds and big personalities. Think of Denis Healey, Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, Roy Hattersley, Tony Benn, Peter Shore, Michael Foot. From some of these the SDP was born, a party the ghost of which still stalks our 21st-century politics.

The stature of such men and women was huge. The questions were huge. Where should the party stand on Europe? On devolution? On our relationship with America? On nuclear weapons and nuclear-generated power? Ideologically, should Labour turn to the left or right? Long years in office had diminished Labour’s capacity to govern but not the giants among its leadership.

But where are the giants who will walk from the wreckage of new Labour next year? Blair has gone. Brown will be bust. The party will surely not be turning back two chapters to Alan Milburn, David Blunkett or Charles Clarke. Leaving whom? Harman, Balls, the Milibands, Blears, Purnell?

Only Peter Mandelson looks big among that company, and I do not recognise in it the ingredients of a great debate on the future of Labour. Looking at the dishevelled ranks of this expiring administration, what can we see that points forward to the big decisions – or even the big choices – that the Opposition front bench facing David Cameron and his crew will have to grapple with?

Stunted ministers, stunted careers, stunted ideas.

Back, then, to the politicians who should be leading the news. Who are these Tories? Do they even themselves really know, in their hearts as well as their heads, that just ahead lie the last summer holidays, and the last party conference, when they will not be in charge of the country? It’s time we did what Tony Blair so regularly urged us to do: move on. It’s time we started to find out.