The official line is that circumstances are exceptional. Yet doesn't it all seem so familiar? A huge public sector, the state running the banks, the economy directed by a political council. Borrowing higher than ever; taxes on the rich going up, sterling falling rapidly; growth in reverse. Isn't this how Labour governments fail?

Only four Labour leaders have suffered the fate that Gordon Brown is trying to avoid. Ramsay MacDonald (twice), Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan all met their end on the way out of Downing Street. Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are the same but that all unhappy families are different. The last days in office of Labour prime ministers show us that the same is true in politics.

MacDonald is now a metaphor for treachery like no other. I once comprehensively lost an argument in which I suggested that Stalin was probably worse than Ramsay MacDonald. Not in Islington North Labour party he wasn't.

This reputation dates from the catastrophe of 1931, which sets the template for Labour financial disasters. A crash in the value of stock, began in America and spread to Britain, causing a serious run on the pound. MacDonald formed a National Government of all the talents and Labour was annihilated.

That was his second term in office. The 1924 Labour Government fell in unique circumstances. Just before polling day, a letter was sent to the Daily Mail and the Foreign Office, purportedly written by a senior source in the Kremlin. The Zinoviev Letter, as it became known, demanded a British revolution. It was probably a forgery but it had its effect. Labour was thrashed in the election in November 1924.

After 1931 Labour had to wait 20 years to fail again. The 1945 Government is the shining exception in the history that Labour tells itself. But, in fact, Attlee's Government expired exhausted after six years.

The country was struggling with bills accumulated in winning the Second World War. Rationing was in full force and Stafford Cripps, a former gentleman firebrand, had transformed himself into a very austere Chancellor of the Exchequer. Only Alistair Darling has surpassed him either for willed dullness or borrowing requirement.

The same mitigation cannot be applied to Harold Wilson. In 1964 Wilson was elected as the common man from the North who, all the same, understood new-fangled things such as aluminium smelting. But in 1966 his Government went through protracted agonies about whether to devalue sterling. The November 1967 Budget provoked a serious run on the pound and the Government was devalued even more than the currency. The Wilson Government stumbled on until 1970 when it vacated office with no great fanfare.

Wilson had a second spell as Prime Minister in 1974 but was too tired to last more than two more years. Jim Callaghan, the unelected Prime Minister who walked straight into the financial disaster, is the precursor who haunts Gordon Brown. Problems with the balance of trade and a debt of £12 billion caused another sterling crisis. The IMF demanded cuts in public spending as a condition of a loan.

It was only a stay of execution. The Government's inability to impose a 5 per cent pay settlement on the trades unions led to mass strikes. Bernard Donoughue watched it all from inside No 10, as head of the Policy Unit. “Greedy capitalism with a union card”, as he puts it. Food and oil supplies were interrupted. The North of England had no water. As Donoughue recalls “there were far too many marshmallows and too few vertebrae in Jim's Cabinet”. The final straw was when the public sector union refused to bury the dead.

Donoughue captures the atmosphere perfectly in his diary. As he says: “The depth of the crisis is reflected in the fact that it is not hectic and fraught... it is all very quiet.” Downing Street is a strange warren of a place and moods don't spread round its corners very easily. The atmosphere on the day of the July 7 bombs in 2005 was exactly the same - oddly quiet.

The 1974 Government ended not in tragedy but in farce. The whips squeamishly declined to force Dr Alfred Broughton, a very sick MP, to attend a decisive no-confidence vote. They lost 311-310. The winter of 1978 had done for the Government.

When we search for the start of new Labour this is where the traces lead. When people wonder what new Labour is for, they are missing the point. New Labour was against something. It was against the sort of old Labour that brought the country to the sorry pass of 1978.

The big fact to learn about the Blair and Brown generation is that they resolved that this would never happen to them. This is why people so often get Brown wrong. He is widely thought to be a man of fixed views, derived from deep and serious book learning. In fact, Brown no more has a fixed set of beliefs than a chess player does. He is an expert on opening gambits but is too much of a strategist to waste a lot of time thinking. Brown's secret is the same as Blair's: he is addicted to victory.

This is why the Prime Minister has revelled in the financial crisis. It has given him a problem to solve and moves to make. Hence the search for the hidden beliefs that are finally coming to the surface - the desire for state control, the envy of the rich - is mostly misconceived. Even his fabled faith in the power of the state is limited. He remains the main cheerleader for the Private Finance Initiative. He conducted an audit of government assets to see what he could sell off. And, to give him the credit that is due but has not been paid, he has resolutely made plain, throughout this crisis that open markets are the only long-term answer.

That is the basic difference between now and previous occasions when Labour governments came to a fatal end. They were slowly finding out that the things they believed in actually made no sense. Gordon Brown's latest policies, by contrast have come as a big surprise, not least to himself. Most of what has happened he would not conceivably have imagined. Indeed, the delay in nationalising Northern Rock was rooted in a desire not to do anything so irretrievably 1970s. It was the political equivalent of a good Elton John album.

He has one other get-out clause. The constant incantation that “it started in America” has now gone beyond irritating into comic. But it is basically true. Previous Labour crises were entirely made in Britain. The Government got the blame because it was the Government's fault.

Not that this offers any immunity from political failure. The reason why Labour will lose, if it does, is that the public will conclude that it has nothing more to say. But, for the moment, a fleeting opportunity has opened up before Brown. His Government was, for too long, an administration of bits and bobs. The financial crisis offers an opportunity nobody would have dared to hope for even three months ago.

And this may yet be the ultimate departure from the historical record. Financial crises have broken previous Labour administrations. It is not likely, but it is possible, that this time around, it might be the making of it.

- Philip Collins is a Times leader writer and was chief speechwriter for Tony Blair

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