Perhaps Harold Wilson's adage no longer holds; for a week suddenly seems a perilously short time in the life of Tony Blair's premiership. Last week, David Blunkett. Yesterday, the Terrorism Bill. Next week? Mr Blair's first-ever defeat was bloody and brutal. By a staggering 31-vote margin MPs overturned the prime minister's Commons majority and dismissed his proposal to allow police to hold terror suspects for 90 days, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
And the obvious questions were immediately piled high at the Downing Street door. Is the prime minister's authority finally shot? Faced with the likelihood of even more furious Labour rebellions to come - not least over his controversial education plans - is there any way back from here?
Or will yesterday's defeat simply hasten Mr Blair's departure from Number 10? The prime minister was in unrepentant mood as he licked his wounds and repeated the new mantra - "better to lose and do the right thing".
Falling back on his earlier line of attack, he insisted, too, that this was not just a question about his leadership "but about the leadership of other parties as well".
We may expect more of this rear-guard action in the coming days as Mr Blair takes stock, repositions himself and, once again, sets out to reassert his authority.
He shook his head in disbelief as the tellers announced the result. And, truth be told, neither Mr Blair nor his advisers could credit in advance that the Conservatives would allow this defeat at the hands of more than 40 Labour rebels.
Nor could those who captioned the front page of yesterday's Sun. 'Dumb and Dumber' ran the headline over images of Tory leadership contenders David Davis and David Cameron in response to their refusal to back Blair, despite clear evidence of massive public support for the prime minister's "crackdown on terror."
Many Tories, too, were fearful that Mr Howard and his would-be successors had made an awful mistake, cosying-up to the Liberal Democrats while Mr Blair put himself on the side of the police and the men and women in the frontline of the fight against what is indisputably a new era of "terrorism without limit".
Hence the confidence that the Labour rebellion would be offset by Tory defections, and the belief that the government would at least win its "fail-safe" amendment allowing police to hold suspects for 60 days.
Those same Tories will now be praying Mr Howard does not come to rue his decision to hail yesterday "a good day for our parliamentary democracy and for our security".
As with the decision to side with the US on the war in Iraq, there is an obligation on men who seriously aspire to replace a prime minister to consider what they would actually do on finding themselves in his position.
Yet that will be cold comfort now for Mr Blair. For the fact is that he failed to bring his own party with him, despite his assertion that anything less than 90 days would be to compromise Britain's national security.
He will, naturally, ignore Mr Howard's invitation to regard this as a confidence issue and go now. However, that will not stop the growing, persistent questioning within his own ranks as to when he should go - and as to why he stays.
He wants to shape a personal legacy which helps bequeath Labour a fourth term. But yesterday merely confirmed that large enough numbers of Labour MPs no longer think Mr Blair's interests and their own are one and the same. They are prepared to hurt him if he refuses to yield, and he, famously, has "no reverse gear". It is difficult to see why things should start to get better.