If Britain's bestselling newspaper heavyweights are anything to go by, Gordon Brown's chances of still being the UK's Prime Minister by the time the election results become clear in the early hours of Friday morning are slim to none. And as one American broadcaster put it, "slim has left town".
Though the polls differ on what slice of the pie each of the three major UK parties will get, the majority are now pointing to the Conservatives obtaining the majority of seats in parliament. And even if Labour does manage to get into a position where it can be returned to government, it is being said the party will opt - either through choice or by coercion - to go for someone other than Mr Brown as its head.
The demise of the Labour leader, according to some, was sealed by his remarks last Tuesday after he climbed into his car following a prickly encounter with a female senior citizen. Not realising he still had a live television microphone attached to his suit, Mr Brown told a close aide that the woman was a "bigot" after she had complained about the presence of legitimate Eastern European immigrants.
No amount of apologising afterwards - rather than put the incident behind him, Mr Brown unwisely ditched his schedule to go to the woman's home and say sorry in person - could fix the damage the media inflicted upon him. His body language as the recording was played back to him while he was doing a BBC radio interview could easily have been taken to suggest he was a man about to face a firing squad.
The reality is that this incident will not, in itself, lose him the election, no matter how much the Tory-supporting media say otherwise. The television debates between the three leaders - a surprisingly new but no doubt from now on permanent feature of British electoral campaigns - will have a far more decisive say in that regard after singlehandedly elevating the status of the eloquent Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg.
But it does throw up a salient example of what politics has turned into: a 24-hour media circus where cameras, microphones and reporters follow a party leader's every movement and utterance just waiting for that one moment when he slips or says something that is not politically correct - in all the senses of the term.
The question is: is this desirable? From the point of view of media coverage, yes. The public these days demand up-to-the-minute coverage on their televisions, computers and mobile phones, and it is up to the various mediums to satisfy that need.
But what kind of politicians are we getting in return? Forceful, colourful characters like Winston Churchill (who famously retorted when a woman expressed her disgust at his being drunk, "You are very ugly. But I will be sober in the morning")? Or are we getting bland characters who spend their days trying not to say or do anything they believe might lose them votes, at the expense of telling the electorate what they really think?
The answer, unfortunately, is the latter, which is not good news either for politics or the various electorates. But there is one thing that has, so far, not changed: it is only when the votes are counted that people will actually know what the result will be. Which is why the British election still promises to be a cliff-hanger.