Gordon Brown’s great clunking fist was trembling with rage after David Cameron’s taunts in the Commons over the Queen’s speech last week. The prime minister is bearing the brunt of the Tory offensive alone. Where are his senior colleagues when he needs them? Where are Labour’s Big Four?

When Tony Blair entered Downing Street he had an already formidable Brown for his chancellor. But there were other big beasts, too. The late Robin Cook, his first foreign secretary, was a ferocious Commons performer who memorably ripped the guts out of the John Major government with his great speech on arms to Iraq. Peter Mandelson is now remembered for being his own worst enemy, but before he disappeared up his own mortgage he had been a serpentine strategist.

Now look across the floor of the House. Cameron has in William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, an accomplished speaker and a former opposition leader. George Osborne has won his spurs as shadow chancellor by outsmarting the prime minister on inheritance tax cuts. David Davis has seen off three home secretaries and is hungry for a fourth. The ferocious Liam Fox prowls at defence: he looks as if he would like to bomb Iran before breakfast.

In contrast, many of Labour’s heavy-weights have retired from the fray – victims, like John Reid, of Brown’s long war of attrition against Blair and the Blairites. The prime minister proclaims the restoration of cabinet government after 10 years of sofa-seated presidential rule, but in practice Labour’s Big Four has shrunk to Labour’s Big One.

The party used to pride itself on its wealth of talent. To pluck just a few names out of an overflowing hat, Harold Wilson had his successor James Callaghan (the template for all Blair’s tough talking home secretaries), the graceful Roy Jenkins and the intellectual bruiser, Denis Healey. Go back further to Clement Attlee’s postwar governments: Ernest Bevin, Herbert Morrison and Stafford Cripps were all household names before taking office.

Brown, of course, has his epigoni. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, can project beyond the Westminster village although his political talents at the moment are seemingly being employed on seeing off his Africa minister, Lord Malloch-Brown (Brown’s special appointment from the United Nations). Ed Balls, the schools supremo, has the requisite intellectual and mental toughness. Perhaps their day will come. But until then, what of Brown’s key lieutenants at the Treasury and the Home Office? And who is directing our armed forces during fighting as bitter as any since 1945?

Major’s first unfortunate chancellor, Norman Lamont, tells in his memoirs how he went to visit his son at school in Canterbury. As he got out of the car a mother and child spotted him. “Mum,” said the little boy, “it’s that man who has ruined the country.” Unpopularity is in the job description when it comes to the Treasury. A chancellor needs a thick skin to protect him from colleagues who demand money with menaces. And he must, if only occasionally, stand up to his prime minister.

Alistair Darling has not proved that he is up to the job. He was made chancellor by his fellow Scot to do Brown’s bidding: the brief was not to make headlines but to avoid them. Winning the next election and restoring the reputation of the public services are the prime minister’s priorities. Darling successfully Mogadoned into oblivion the public’s awareness of the government’s failures while he was at transport. Now his job is to keep the Treasury machine humming quietly at the scene of Gordon’s greatest triumphs. But the prime minister forgot one thing: it doesn’t matter if a chancellor is dull or his delivery is turgid – it may even help – but he must cut a reassuring figure to the public in a crisis.

The rock on which this government has sought to build its reputation is a stable, growing economy. But already on Darling’s watch has come the Northern Rock disaster, the first run on a British bank in 140 years. The chancellor stands accused of dithering as the storm broke. A more forceful chancellor could have taken by the scruff of their necks an equally dilatory Bank of England and Financial Services Authority before having to bail the Rock out with billions of our money.

At first, paradoxically, the run on the Rock helped Labour. The public turns to a trusted nurse in times of trouble and away from an untested opposition. But as the tale of woe rolls on, the government’s reputation for financial competence is being eroded. When Ruth Kelly, the transport secretary, boasted of economic stability on BBC1’s Question Time a fortnight ago, the audience laughed. Politically, derision is more deadly than anger.

Darling’s prebudget report looked like a humiliating attempt to play catchup on inheritance tax with the Tories. Worse still, everyone knows the prime minister has been running policy behind the chancellor’s back.

His plans to scrap tax relief on capital gains and introduce an 18% flat rate enraged business. Darling refused to climb down. The editors of The Times and The Daily Telegraph knew better. Briefed by No 10 they splashed on a government cave-in while the Treasury was still holding out against concessions. Darling is a decent, loyal man– he deserved better from his clan chief.

In a survey of business opinion last Monday, only 4% thought Darling understood the City best (compared with 27% for Osborne and 24% for Brown). Business knows a weak chancellor does not reflect well on a strong prime minister any more than a nonentity of a chairman and an overbearing chief executive officer are good for a big company. With the economic weather set for stormy, Darling will have to shape up or ship out.

Trouble is not only brewing at the Treasury. The Home Office should be only half “unfit for purpose” now that our overcrowded prisons have been hived off to Jack Straw’s new Ministry of Justice. But Jacqui Smith, the first woman to become home secretary, has yet to show authority. She has the bedside manner of a speaking clock.

Pressed on Radio 4’s Today programme last week, Smith failed to give a precise figure on how many days she wanted to extend the locking up of suspects before trial. She is proposing to legislate “just in case”. This wasn’t good enough. Brown thought so, too, and let it be known that he wanted a full 56-day power of incarceration. When Davis eviscerated Ms Smith in the Commons in a bravura defence of Britain’s hard-won freedoms, she was stunned into stupefied silence.

As Home Secretary she must offer security in times of national emergency. You adopt the mask of command, not the manner of a concerned teacher.

At Defence another Scot, Desmond Browne, is also one of the walking wounded. He has scarcely recovered from the Royal Navy’s humiliation in the Persian Gulf last year. This autumn brings more trials. His minister of procurement, Lord Drayson, has resigned in order to spend more time with his motor cars. On the same day a coroner reported that a soldier, Gordon Gentle, died in Iraq because his kit was delivered too late. The suggestion is that Drayson fell out with his boss’s supine response to Treasury penny-pinching.

The armed services are fighting small but nasty wars on the cheap and are getting fed up with inadequate equipment. Last week the UK National Defence Association protested that inadequate spending on defence was undermining the troops. Financial restrictions, it said, “were all too often being paid by men and women of our armed forces in blood”.

Browne, like Darling, is treated like a doormat by No 10. The defence secretary seemed to be the last to know about troop cuts when the prime minister announced them during his ill-judged flying visit to Iraq during the Tory party conference.

In the brutal maul of Commons politics there is no room for the lame and the halt. But confidence can only come from a secure relationship with the PM. Brown, a senior Tory jeered, wasa cross between a paranoid Richard Nixon and the nonhuman side of Mr Spock.” It’s lonely at the top but it doesn’t have to be this lonely, Gordon.

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