Britain:The year 2007 finally saw Britain's long-(if not everywhere eagerly) awaited transfer of political power. Until the vacancy had been declared six weeks before, Tony Blair's remaining loyalists had tried in vain to find someone - at times it seemed almost anyone - to enter the succession race.
Alan Johnson, Alan Milburn, Charles Clarke, John Hutton, John Reid were in turn touted and written off as lacking credibility or support. Then, with just time to spare, the seemingly more likely David Miliband rejected their collective blandishments and took cover from the approaching Scottish juggernaut, electing to live, and hopefully fight, another day.
So, after years of resistance and doubt, the Great Helmsman - and the party's only leader ever to win two, then three successive terms in office - handed the Labour crown to Gordon Brown, the friend and comrade turned bitter rival, who had considered the inheritance properly his in the first place.
Against all expectation Blair had managed the longest farewell in political history, contriving to leave office on something of a high - despite continuing bad news from Iraq, not least courtesy of a historic breakthrough in Northern Ireland - while bequeathing the party against which he had so frequently defined himself the promised orderly transition.
The manner of Blair's leaving was magnificent, theatre of the kind Britons had allegedly grown tired of (and which some commentators fancied they would all too quickly miss). Indeed, such was his mastery during his final Commons appearance, The Irish Times noted: "After 'New' Labour's 1997 landslide victory they formed the most successful relationship between a prime minister and chancellor in living memory. Yet this brilliant pairing could also prove explosive and dysfunctional, poisoned by Brown's belief that Blair had reneged on a promise to make way for him during a second term.
"And even yesterday, as he endured Blair's final prime minister's question time in the Commons, the impatient Brown could have been forgiven for briefly wondering if, even at the last, his friend and rival might somehow deny him. For listening in the gallery during those final 30 minutes there were certainly moments when the rest of us still found it hard to believe that Blair - the triple election winner, most successful Labour leader in history, and, still, outstanding politician of his generation - was actually going."
When he concluded - "That is it - the end" - the electrifying charge was felt through the palace of Westminster and beyond. Scottish Nationalist MPs may have remained doggedly in their places, but Conservative leader David Cameron famously urged uncertain Tories to their feet as a tearful Margaret Beckett and the rest of the cabinet led Labour MPs in an unprecedented standing ovation.
In that moment at least all divisions and disagreements were forgotten as Labour, New and Old, celebrated past successes while permitting themselves to savour the prospect, perhaps, of more to come.
They could not have known how close they were to a sensational fourth-term victory under their unchallenged new leader nor, by end year, that that now-distant prospect would be shrouded in doubt as Blairites and some others began to wonder if they had made the wrong choice.
It took just 90 minutes for the winds of change to sweep Whitehall during which time Blair, then Brown, departed the King's Door at Buckingham Palace - the former, after 10 years in power, now a Middle East envoy, the latter Queen Elizabeth's 11th prime minister of the UK.
Brown had waited a lifetime for the moment. And few doubted, as he crossed the threshold of Number 10, that he had fully prepared for his "new government with new priorities". Travelling the country and listening to the British people, Brown declared he had "heard the need for change" and realised this could not be satisfied by a continuation of "the old politics".
The message could not have been clearer. Blair was gone, and with him the angst over the war, the tawdry business of "cash for honours", the glitz and "spin".
Brown - previously feared by colleagues and civil servants as a Stalinist control freak - would be the "change" candidate, newly collegiate, presiding over "a government of all the talents" guided by the "moral compass" inherited in the Scottish Manse.
Some were highly sceptical, suspecting "the end of spin" to be "the new spin" - particularly after Brown's appearance with president Bush at Camp David and the impression allowed (subsequently corrected) that British foreign policy was being charted in a new direction. Yet even the Blairites who thought to know him best were silenced by a media honeymoon that saw some Tory commentators - hostile to the "too-liberal" or centrist Cameron - warm to what they saw as Brown's social conservatism.
A succession of "crises" - foot and mouth disease, failed terror attacks in London and Glasgow - only buttressed Brown's reputation for calm and competence. Indeed that claim to competence was the dominant theme in his speech to the Labour conference in September.
At that point the opinion polls had convinced Brown's inner circle, and they just about everybody else, that the new prime minister would and should call a snap autumn election to win a mandate in his own right.
The suggestion was that the master strategist not only wanted to win, but win big enough to destroy Cameron's leadership, force a Tory split, and establish Labour as the party of government for another generation. Had he seized the moment in Bournemouth, it might just have worked.
However, it was the old cautious Brown who prevailed, delaying in anticipation of a Conservative implosion in Blackpool a week later. It didn't happen, while the polls proved as reliable as a sunny day in August. And when Brown "bottled" it, he then invited ridicule by suggesting the polls played no part in his decision to take time to unveil his vision for the British people.
As he prepares his New Year relaunch, the prime minister's assurance is (surely?) that his subsequent run of bad luck - illegal immigrants in the security industry, the lost data of 25 million people, Labour's concealed donations and three new police inquiries - can't last forever and that he has time to recover.
And yet not as much time as widely suggested. Recovery - against deepening gloom about the economic outlook - should allow for a 2009 election. Forced to delay to 2010, and the story may instead be of a government finding itself boxed in, its options reducing, and time running out.