It was the Guardian wot won it...

Forget young George's wizard Inheritance Tax plans, DC's 'Messy, But Me' speech, or the polling data from crucial marginals. The real thing that led the spanners Balls, Alexander and Milliband Minor to suddenly go cold on a snap election, and for Gordon to 'bottle it', was I'm told, the colourful floor plan for the planned Conservative 'war room' at Millbank, leaked to The Guardian on Thursday.

This front page story sent seismic reverberations around Labour HQ and was the critical moment when they realised how ill prepared they were for the election, and that crucially someone has made a prettier and more detailed plan their own.

Of course, they should have known that this plan, complete with little individual desks and names, was actually a classic example of work avoidance and procrastination - like a 6th former who spends most of their first week's study leave creating a detailed revision timetable, only to pin it up, go down the pub and never refer to it again.

I happen to know that Caroline S. spent much of her summer holidays on her hands and knees with little pieces of card with 'Lord Ashcroft', 'Sheridan Westlake' etc written on each, trying out 101 different permutations as if planning a particularly large wedding breakfast where virtually none of the guests like each other.

Once she was happy with it, a hand-drawn version, complete with shading in mauves, pinks and blues using Caran d'Ache pencils, was dispatched to G. who took one look at it, threw it away, and began the whole process all over again. Caroline was very put out apparently, and her voice was heard to quaver even more than usual when she complained about it to DC. Still, at least her original colour scheme survived to be used in the final version.

In the absence of any real work having taken place to plan for the election in the last couple of months, this painstakingly detailed 'war room' floor plan - designed and redesigned on HQ's state of the art Mac - was about the only thing we had to show for 1000s of hours worked over the last few weeks, and just about the only thing in the building worth leaking.

And to think this Labour election gurus pulled the plug on an early election because they thought we had it all sorted...