Hill+Knowlton Strategies

The debates are over. Now is the time for decisions to be made. So says the Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

His fear though must be that the voters have already decided. Their minds are already made up. And what they seem to have decided whoever it is who will run Britain it won’t be Gordon Brown.

No one believed that the debates would be the forum in which the PM would flourish, but in the last one he had to. Nothing suggests that the public feel he did.

Now the Labour campaign have less than a week to find a way to reach out to the one in four voters who say they have yet to make up their minds. The question is how.

David Cameron hasn’t flourished in the debates as some thought he would, but he has done enough it seems. This has not been a triumphant march to Downing Street for the Conservatives, partly thanks to the surprise effect of Nick Clegg.

But there is just the sense that they are beginning to inch their way to a meaningful gap over their opponents.

Yes the holy grail of a 40 per cent share of the vote seems far away, but leads of two and three per cent are now regularly turning into leads of five and seven points in some polls.

If Labour and the LibDems fade, in an election when the contest seems genuinely three way, the Conservatives could pick up seats more easily than they expected without the scale of swing that was described when it looked like a two horse race.

The last seven days are going to be the hard yards of this campaign as all three main parties try to grind out votes.

For Labour at the moment it looks like a battle for survival – they may be all but guaranteed to be second in the number of seats but to come third in the popular vote would be devastating.

Clegg’s LibDems need to ensure that this election doesn’t turn into a psyche-scarring false dawn. They are likely to fade a little, but are unlikely to get a chance like this again to grasp second place.

And for David Cameron, his own personal survival is at stake. Many within his own party will question how he cannot win an outright majority in these circumstances – and unpopular PM, a party in office for 13 years, the worst recession for 60 years and then the expenses scandal.

If he fails to win a majority we can expect to be back at the polls within 12 months, but there will be many in his party who will feel they might need a new leader for that election if he fails to convince in this one.

The questions in the final week are these. Can the Conservatives do enough for outright victory? Will the Labour vote collapse to make that easier for them? And can Nick Clegg stop his vote softening and regain momentum?

And all of this in an election where the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has said that the party that wins is likely to be out for a generation because of all the unpopular things they will have to do to straighten the nation’s finances.

A good election to lose? No one in the leadership of the three parties will think so. And then there is the question of how badly it is lost.

This election has been the most dramatic and unpredictable for decades. Predictions now are risky.

But unless there is a dramatic shift, it looks like this election might just be the first in a pair.

And how the bond markets react to that will determine the futures of the parties – and the futures of millions of Britons.