It's like Le Mans but for 18 months

It's pretty clear that this week and possibly the next few will be the toughest that Brown has faced in Downing Street. when you put aside the 'bottler' meme which in my view has limited shelf life without other events to back it up, he also has to face a media which currently is a tad annoyued with him. However, as I said in the comments in my Saturday post, what Tories need to be mindful of is complacency.

We now know - that barring an unlikely and dramatic U-turn - there will not be a General Election for 18 months. If a week is a long time in politics then that is an eternity. Events in the months ahead hold the key to either Brown's Bounceback or Cameron's Continuity, and the last thing the Tories must do is under-estimate the former in the hope that it will maintain the latter.

The real weakness that was exposed this weekend was not Brown's personal one, but a collective strategy failure and a failure to appreciate just how difficult a task the likes of Alastair Campbell pulled off for so long and so well. The wheels stopped spinning this weekend when the brakes locked on the Labour machine. Currently it is sitting in the hard shoulder waiting for the RAC.

Tories need to know, and be aware, that the man in a van will arrive at some point and get them going again. They need therefore to increase the distance on the road between them and be prepared for some F1 style challenges on the chicanes that make up political communications when the rival teams meet up again.

What this means first is that now is the time to raise the shadow cabinet profiles. There is name recognition with some of them but not nearly enough. For every press release pumped out of the Government New Network there needs to be a rebuttal release highlighting the flaws in the annoucements with comments from the relevant shadow.

It is all very well that the usual names appear, but there are members of the shadow cabinet who remain non-entities and there is now 18 months to change that. Brown is - as I said on Saturday - damaged, but in isolation that event is not his death toll. It will require constant and relentless pressure to get that view entrenched in the political consciousness of the nation, and the lead on the track is the Tories to lose if complacency sets in.

Blair et al feared complacency to the wire in 1997 because of the "Lesson of 1992". What the Tories must not do is find themselves with a "Lesson of 2009".