This was the week New Labour landed back on Planet Earth. And for many people in Britain - regardless of their views on Europe or the euro - the spectacle was joyous to behold. In the early hours of Monday morning the long honeymoon finally came to an end . . . leaving the People's Party reeling from its first electoral defeat under Tony Blair, his colleagues contemplating the first compelling remainder of his and their political mortality.
Nothing had prepared them for this. True, when Mr Blair first addressed his Parliamentary Party in the aftermath of the Tory wipe out in 1997, he warned them always to remember they were the servants of the people, and not the masters.
But humility has hardly been the hallmark of this administration or its bloated backbench following. In next to no time, it seemed, all thoughts (and lessons) of 18 years in the wilderness had been banished. New Labour had acquired the winning habit, and assumed to sweep all before it.
This truth was all-too-apparent soon after the general election triumph. Barely four months on, on the eve of the Welsh devolution referendum, it seemed a No vote might be on the cards. A member of the prime minister's circle explained that this would be disastrous, leaving Scotland "sticking out like a sore thumb" and calling into question the government's assurances that devolution was no threat to the unity of the kingdom.
One could see the point. But still. If the Welsh didn't really want devolution? And Mr Blair had to lose sometime, didn't he? The Labour insider had heard that heretical notion before. "Certain trade union leaders say that to the prime minister," he told me: "And Tony always replies, `Why?' "
They were all asking "Why?" last Monday morning, after their worst expectations had given way to a full appreciation of the horror that had unfolded.
But the penny had been slow to drop. Even the preceding Friday, amid predictions of a worst-ever turnout, some Labour spokesmen had appeared sanguine - dismissing as barely relevant the opinion of a quarter of the electorate, and suggesting the end result would leave William Hague precisely where they wanted him, in the leadership of the Conservative Party.
There was even a crumb of comfort for Margaret Beckett (who has surely been in charge of campaigning for the last time) at the start of Sunday night's election programme, as polling expert Prof Anthony King warned against reading too much into results based on such a low turnout.
But it was to be her last. By the end of the night the professor was singing a very different tune. This had been a "horrendous" night, leaving Labour gasping to just fight-off the nationalist challengers in Scotland and Wales; sensationally losing some 82 per cent of its general election vote in the north-west; and nationally claiming just 28 per cent of the votes cast - a worse performance, in fact, than in the European elections fought just weeks after Margaret Thatcher's first election victory in 1979.
When parties lose elections, the search for scapegoats is seldom long-delayed. Mrs Beckett denied reports that she had actually taken a week's holiday at a vital point in the campaign. But whatever about that, the case for not having her in charge of campaigning (or masquerading as a "spin doctor" on election night) was vividly demonstrated during a television encounter with Paddy Ashdown.
Even out of adversity can come political opportunity. And the most immediate speculation focused on the proportional representation system chosen for this contest, and the question of Mr Blair's commitment to hold a referendum on PR for Westminster before the next election.
Mrs Beckett, like John Prescott and Jack Straw, is thought among those senior ministers who would consider this a step in Lib/Lab partnership too far. But when she tried to attribute Labour's European election defeat to the government's generosity in granting proportional representation, Mr Ashdown would have none of it. To her evident incredulity, Mr Ashdown patiently explained that on a first-past-the-post basis, Labour would actually have fared much worse. Analysts said the party's 29 seats could have been reduced to 15.
The Liberal Democrat leader reserved his biggest criticism for Mr Blair, however. The prime minister, he said, who had been so magnificent on so many fronts, had "completely failed to show any of those leadership qualities of which he is capable" on the issue of the euro.
While Mr Hague had galvanised his core constituency with the message that Britain should be "in Europe not run by Europe", Labour had attempted to fight on the strength of Mr Blair's domestic achievements, and insisted the election had nothing to do with the euro.
Indeed campaign literature for the Labour leader in the European Parliament, Ms Pauline Green, informed voters she had views about Dusty Springfield and Star Trex, while telling nothing of her attitude to the Single Currency.
"On this essential issue for the country's future, we have been doing the job the government should have been doing," declared Mr Ashdown: "Mr Blair tells us this is essential to his project. But he has completely failed to give a lead."
Mr Ashdown's angst might be explained partly by a disappointing set of results at the point of his departure from the Lib Dem leadership, and the embarrassment of losing his own Yeovil vote to the Tories.
But as Labour's pro-European Giles Radice lamented, in "a low-level campaign" which didn't begin to tell people why they should bother to vote, the scale of the fallout for Mr Blair's European policy became clear. Mr Michael Heseltine, the former Conservative deputy prime minister, blasted Mr Blair for making "a real nonsense" of the campaign. Insisting the prime minister could not continue taking "a detached view", Mr Hesltine made it clear he would not be joining a cross-party campaign for the euro until Mr Blair came forward to lead it. "He has to decide what he's going to do about the euro, and I will do nothing until he does," declared the leading Tory Europhile.
Apart from the possible evidence of growing alienation among Labour's traditional supporters, this is the key question arising from Mr Blair's election defeat. And the two are at least in one sense related: for that alienation will derive from Mr Blair's pursuit of Middle England, and Middle England's press is decidedly Euro-sceptic.
Will Mr Blair now decide to risk the coalition which won him the last election by assuming leadership of the campaign to join the euro? And, if not, can he credibly hope to go into the next election with a referendum "soon" to follow, while maintaining his government has yet to make up its mind?
It may of course be that the euro will lose some of its salience as the general election approaches, and the Tories could be cast as a "single- issue" party. But as the Conservatives and the UK Independence Party have demonstrated, this particular single issue finds a resonance. And Mr Hague is plainly determined to make the defence of sterling a central issue in an election campaign in which the Euro-sceptic press will hardly prove as compliant as last time, and in which evasions, as one Labour source puts it, "will not serve as answers".
One astute observer said Mr Blair can give the appearance of boldness by moving ahead of the game at a critical point, certain from the knowledge of his polls and focus groups that the public will back him.
But on the euro the polls, public and private, show opinion in Britain running against him. The question is whether he will gamble his popularity to turn it back.