A rare moment for me: a close-quarters encounter with half a dozen CEOs and chairmen of FTSE 100 top flight blue chip companies – telecoms, finance, energy, and more.

A strangely upbeat crew. Intriguingly, I did not detect a great lust for political change. Stranger too I detected a strong, though not universal degree of confidence in the present Chancellor, but more curiously I did find a universal unease about the management and leadership of Conservative economic policy.

So have these industrial and commercial titans gone native? Are the embers of New Labour somehow their plaything? Has the prospect of additional gongs to their knighthoods, peerages and the rest, lost none of the lustre of old, despite parliament’s present low repute? Or are we witnessing a strange high level revolution unfolding out there in the Square Mile.

Has Labour quite simply, despite all, become the party of Big Business? Has politics been turned on its head, with the Tories the now self-declared party of “workers” co-operatives?

I concluded the mood rested on something a little more solid in terms of respect than the above. Multi-national bosses do not elect governments, but so near an election I was, as I say, intrigued.

As regards bullying – not one of my informants was shocked by the “Brown revelations” .

Every one of them expressed the view that the reported behaviour is entirely consistent with high-pressure leadership activity.

Churchill was conjured as were a number of industry bosses whom I won’t name. Indeed the thought was expressed that if the prime minister of the day did not lose his rag at regular intervals – bang the table, tug the lapels, and the rest there would be something seriously awry.

There was a sense that tugging the Whitehall blancmange into focused activity was enough to test anyone’s patience.

What a strange world we live in.

The economics team I work with – Faisal and his backroom wizard, Neil Macdonald, tell me, and you, that today’s UK pre-budget report will stand or fall on the whims of a handful of economists across the world.

Not any old economist but largely those who work for the so-called “ratings agencies”.These are the people who will run their slide rules over Alistair Darling’s measures announced today – it is largely upon their judgements that the fortunes of the pound and the external assessment of the health of the UK will ride.

What perplexes me is why these ratings guys are still in business at all. And they are mainly guys.

These are the very folks, working for “reputable” ratings agencies who accord Lehman Brothers and the massive AIG, RBS, HBOS and the rest, “triple A” ratings shortly before they all went bust.

If we want ratings at all, and I have no idea whether we do or we don’t, it seems to me that these agencies are an entirely unhelpful entity.

The job should be given to an accountable global body which can be held to account for its judgements.

But then this science itself – if science it be – is itself far from precise. It is often psychological, atmospheric, abstract, and subject to circumstances that are almost impossible to predict.

So, is it time to call a halt to the existence of ratings agencies?

Come forth one of you and defend your right to exist on this, er, sensitive day!

To answer my own initial question: Purnell has broken from the pack. He has done what David Miliband, conceivably Andy Burnham, and maybe John Hutton (of whom more in a moment), might have done and must have been thinking of doing.

Purnell has plunged a knife that has been waiting for such an exercise for some considerable time.

David Miliband was so badly bruised by events last autumn that I think he has effectively given up any ambition he had to become leader (and I’m not sure he had much in the first place).

Burnham is still too untried to have made much difference – hence the Burnham-Miliband cries of support for Brown in the aftermath of Purnell’s resignation.

So James Purnell becomes the front runner to position himself at least as the leader of the Blairite faction and maybe more.

Alistair Darling has seen off a serious bid by Brown to defenestrate him. It would have been very bad for the appearance of the government’s management of the economy. He has a better record as chancellor than brown himself thus far.

(Read Martin Kettle Guardian online: “Darling should stay but will be sacrificed for his honesty.” It spells out why in the end, despite its headline, Brown’s hands were tied).

The ambitious Ed Balls will now almost certainly never become chancellor of the exchequer. And that will in large part be due to his own involvement in “dark arts” mentioned in my earlier blog.

So that leaves the resignation of John Hutton, a nice man who reached the summit of his ambition in becoming defence secretary. He’s gone without much explanation and so far without negative comment on Brown.

But his mere removal adds to the sense of Brown’s powerlessness: a cabinet reshuffling itself.

A political crisis
This is a political spectacle none of us has ever seen before. The government is reshuffling itself.

Hazel Blears has just shuffled herself out of the Cabinet. She’d have been fired anyway over her second homery and non-payment of capital gains tax.

Two other ministers, one of them another woman, are expected to go today. There is talk that Alistair Darling may go. No-one can remember a time in British politics when ministers resigned on the eve of an election.

A constitution in crisis
And there is no constitutional mechanism for resolving the situation. The head of state cannot send for a prime minister whose power is disintegrating, and that’s a good thing. Our system sports a head of state who is anyway unaccountable – no-one can send for him or her either.

Thus we depend upon the holding of a general election, which can only be called by the person who is himself in such appalling trouble: the prime minister. We are, amid the personal failures of MPs within parliament, observing the vast crevasse in what is called our constitution.

The Sun newspaper suggests some kind of petition signed by Labour ministers and MPs that calls for resignation and rallies around an alternative leader – a kind of regicide.

A party in crisis
The dream and vision conjured by the founders of “new” Labour – Blair, Brown, and Mandelson – has come to this.

What is fascinating about this torrid and disturbing period is the absence of any call for the return of the once lionised Tony Blair. No-one mentions him. He came adorned in hope for profound change, then disappeared without much trace.

A country in crisis?
We have a country whose banking system is in turmoil; a parliament reduced to the dust of ages, where the swathes of women who arrived in 1997 appear to have had little impact; an army dispersed in foreign fields; a relationship with Europe unexplained and left to wither; and local communities, most of whose funding and resource is hostage to the spending whims of central government.

And now the electorate is being asked to vote in an election that does not immediately affect this crisis. Its outcome will stoke the pressure, but not necessarily resolve anything.

And yet
Yet amid all this, the country continues to defy the political crisis. For all the talk of knife crime, exam problems, controversy about immigration and the continuing deprivation of significant pockets of the country, Britain remains blessed with a decent, caring, and achieving people.

So Britain’s 12th largest building society goes bust – and the chairman complains that the chancellor isn’t bailing it out.

Stunning! If, as some suggest, the Dunfermline Building Society is a victim of reckless lending, what possible obligation does Mr Darling have to bail it out?

I’m not suggesting foul play, but I am suggesting that unacceptable risks were taken and that the taxpayer should not be involved in trying to shore up failed institutions.

It’s been known that the Dunfermline Building Society was going bust for several weeks. But there’s been no Northern Rock-style run on it, and that’s because the savers have confidence in the government’s pledge to make good their losses.

The question we are bound to ask is: how many more Dunfermlines are there? No-one knows. We are, I fear, still at the beginning of the beginning.

Seeing the steel job losses in communities that can least afford to cope with them, I commend File on 4 on Radio 4 this last Sunday (25 January). They investigated the new bankruptcy laws that make it much easier to go into “administration” and pointed out that whilst jobs in the failed company might be saved, jobs in companies downstream – like Corus in this case – can be seriously affected. The programme made the argument that the new legislation actually generates unemployment.

With every new announcement of job losses, people ask themselves “Will I be next?” The media is no exception – newspapers in neo-meltdown, TV advertising disintegrating before our eyes. “Tough times for the next year,” Chancellor Darling told me on Friday.

One feels increasingly that no one has a clear idea of the true scale of what threatens our wellbeing. There must be the real danger that our own social cohesion will be threatened. And there doesn’t actually appear to be much anyone can do about it. Amid the talk about polls and elections, how long before someone calls for a “government of national unity”?