John Rentoul: Mr Brown is out of touch and out of control

The Government complains that minor matters are capturing the headlines, but the ministerial aide talked out of resigning over the 10p tax band touched a nerve. The penny has dropped among MPs – the Prime Minister will be a handicap at the next election

Gordon Brown is "privately furious", we are told. Publicly, he says: "There are issues about how we get our message across." We in the media are not interested in his very important speech in Boston, he complains. Instead, we are obsessed with the mental picture of the Prime Minister, in between meetings in Washington with the current and next presidents of the United States, and on the phone to a Labour MP back in Britain, trying to talk her out of resigning from a junior, unpaid post.

Brown has a point. Last week's flurry over Alistair Darling's comment, while in China, that ministers had to "sharpen ourselves up" to "have a clear message of what we are about" was silly. George Osborne, Darling's shadow, made himself look ridiculous by describing these mild platitudes as an "unprecedented attack on the Prime Minister by his most senior Cabinet colleague".

And it is true that Meghnad Desai speaks only as a member of the Labour Party and of the House of Lords, and not as even an unpaid adjunct to the Government. But if you provide journalists with top-quality material, they will print it. "Gordon Brown was put on earth to remind people how good Tony Blair was" was a Grade I listed quotation. Not only that, Lord Desai then provided several more, saying that Blair and Brown were like caviar and haggis.

Equally, when after a brief scuffle we worked out that the unpaid ministerial aide who was threatening to resign was not the Angela Smith whose name was vaguely familiar, but the Other Angela Smith, it seemed less of a story. Angela E Smith is one of the Prime Minister's own Parliamentary Private Secretaries – a position that is rather more important than many a junior ministerial office. But this one is Angela C Smith, and she is, and as we go to press remains, PPS to Yvette Cooper, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

If it's only the Other Angela Smith, the less important one in a category that is half a step up from the undifferentiated mass, why should we care? Except that it makes it more embarrassing that Brown should be using his international roaming minutes to talk her out of resigning.

The thing is that Brown knows how important apparently humble ministerial aides can be. After all, it was a revolt by seven PPSs and one junior minister, Tom Watson, in September 2006 that finally forced the door of No 10 for him.

That is the point of Brown's sudden interest in the Other Angela Smith's scruples, bottom lines and, no doubt, various family members. That is why it mattered that five other PPSs have publicly expressed doubts about the wisdom of abolishing the 10p rate of income tax. They do not have much power, but they do have the power to embarrass the Government by resigning.

So the Other Angela Smith heard those sacred words, "putting you through to the Prime Minister now", and was reassured that her "concerns are understood".

I imagine that she was also told that the Treasury is, even now, working on some way of further complicating the tax credit system, which will cost at least several hundreds of millions of pounds to compensate the worst-hit of the net losers from the abolition of the 10p rate. Something will have to be announced before the Commons vote next week, but when I spoke to a man with the spreadsheets at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, he said it was hard to devise a scheme that would get money to the people who had lost out without also giving unlooked-for bonuses to those who had not.

There is no clean way out of this unnecessary mess that Brown has got himself into, and 2.2 million poor people are losing out even if many more poor people are better off. So the media obsession with Angela C Smith is justifiable. Nor are we at fault in failing to get excited about the "new dawn in collaborative action between America and Europe" that Brown announced in his Kennedy Memorial lecture. I sat up when Brown said "and this is my main point", but sank back again when it turned out to be: "To consider and agree new global rules and create new global institutions so that not some but all can benefit from change."

However, this is not a turning point. The Government will not lose the vote next week. Brown may even enjoy some weeks of less unremittingly negative coverage, although he has the vote on 42 days' detention coming up and an eminently losable by-election in Crewe. And since I wrote last week that Brown's chances of winning the next election were negligible, two counter-arguments have been put to me by the Prime Minister's supporters.

One is that David Cameron has not yet "sealed the deal" with the British electorate. Well, he is not as popular as Blair was before 1997, but he doesn't have to be. I recall a conversation among Labour advisers in Portcullis House, the annexe to the Commons, shortly after Cameron was elected leader. "When will Cameron's bubble burst?" asked one, impatient for others to see through the PR front. "About the middle of his second term," replied another, more realistic, voice.

The other argument is that the last two weeks of the "non-Easter" recess, with MPs away and the Government's business in neutral, have been a vacuum into which a farrago of media froth and nonsense has been sucked. And it is true that "herd overshoot" is an increasing phenomenon of the British press. Brown will gain some favourable headlines, and Private Eye may even run a satirical Apology to him: "In common with all other newspapers, we may have given the impression that the Prime Minister is an inarticulate, barely socialised ditherer; we wish to make clear that he is in fact a leader of vision, resolution and saintly personal morals."

But Brown is on a bungee jump, and each time he bounces back up, it will be less high than before, and much less high than the water-walking phase that ended at the party conferences last autumn. The speculation about a leadership challenge may have got ahead of itself, as such speculation always will, but the first important stage has already been passed – a realisation that Brown is unlikely to be able to lead the party to victory at the next election.