Gordon Brown insists he will “get on with the job” after Labour’s shattering defeat in the Glasgow East by-election. That job is one of renewal. The prime minister must do for Labour in office what he did for it in opposition, by providing the party with a new narrative that enables it to make sense of the difficult economic circumstances in which the government now finds itself.

Mr Brown is the real founder of New Labour. It was he who understood, after Labour’s catastrophic general election defeat in 1983 when it gained just 27 per cent of the vote, that Fabian socialism, the socialism of state control, was dead. Social democracy would have to be reformulated to meet the needs of a new world of globalisation, capital flows and information technology. But globalisation was, in the words of the US commentator, Thomas Friedman, a “golden straitjacket” for the left, constraining the achievement of social democracy in one country.