So, let me get this right. The Prime Minister has flown to Washington to celebrate what is now to be called Britain's “special partnership” with the US.

Gordon Brown and Barack Obama will hold a press conference and have a working lunch, No 10 announced. Oh no, they won't. the White House said. There was no formal press conference. And the lunch wasn't even an hour long. Except it wasn't actually lunch. It was “talks”. With a photo opportunity attached.

Given how the itinerary was changing by the minute yesterday, with No 10 desperately scrambling to salvage at least part of a press conference after the White House cancelled it, you could have been forgiven for wondering if President Obama actually knew that Mr Brown was coming to see him at all. It began to look like one of those embarrassing situations when somebody you don't particularly like invites himself to dinner.

You have only to imagine how Mr Obama would have been treated had he flown across the Atlantic to visit us, to see how ridiculous is the idea that this is a “partnership” - or “a partnership of purpose” as Mr Brown put it, in one of those baffling phrases he is fond of. Diaries would have been cleared, banquets organised, the Queen standing to attention. Never mind lunch or a 30-minute chat, the Obamas could have stayed a week if they chose.

I wonder whether the White House was irritated by No 10's attempts to make it sound in advance as though Mr Brown and Mr Obama were somehow equals - worse, as if the British Prime Minister was en route to give Mr Obama instruction in how to handle the economic crisis.

The shenanigans yesterday dredged up unpleasant memories for Labour of another trip to Washington by a party leader, Neil Kinnock, in 1987. Then, in the run-up to the election, the Labour leader was humiliated by Ronald Reagan's failure to spend even the full allotted half-hour with him.

But the Obama snub yesterday was arguably worse: Mr Brown is Prime Minister, not just leader of the Labour Party. And in 1987, the White House snub, including a briefing that undermined Mr Kinnock further, was intentional: the President wanted to support Margaret Thatcher by making the Labour leader look like a twit. More embarrassingly the humiliation of Mr Brown yesterday appeared to be simple carelessness. I think unplanned insult is worse.

Like Mr Kinnock in 1987, Mr Brown is now in the run-up to a general election. Everything that the Government does from here until the poll will be with an eye to judgment day. With the Tories roaring into the lead - in the latest polls they have overtaken Labour as the party most trusted to handle the economic crisis - at best Labour is engaged in damage limitation. At worst, it is engaged in navel-gazing and factionalising for the forthcoming leadership contest.

A consensus has emerged that the election will not be held until the last possible moment, May or June of next year. But it would be in everybody's interests, even Labour's, if it was held much sooner than that.

Can the country really bear another 14 months of this? Not even ministers are sure they can endure it: one member of the Cabinet told me recently that, despite the hell of being in opposition, he could hardly wait for the election to get away from the misery and directionlessness of the Brown regime: “Gordon doesn't start from a position of conviction, he just wants to create dividing lines with the Conservatives.”

Defeat will only loom larger the longer Mr Brown waits. The Prime Minister could even win back a little bit of support by being seen to act in the interests of the country and not of himself. For every day that passes, ministers sound sillier and more lost, and Labour's reputation slips a little further. Harriet Harman's claim last weekend that Sir Fred Goodwin would be forced to give up his pension was a case in point: it was totally, transparently rubbish. And you knew that it was as soon as she had said it.

Is there anything but rubbish left now blowing around Whitehall? Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, announced yesterday a national advertising campaign to raise public awareness of the “policing pledge”, a list of things that we are entitled to expect from the police, such as visible policing and response times, and how to complain if they are not provided them. It's a silly charade of accountability. The advert promises that if you text your postcode and the word PLEDGE to 66101, you will be sent the phone number of your local neighbourhood policing team.

You know a number of things immediately, don't you? The first is that the policing pledge will not make a scrap of difference to how quickly the police answer, or fail to answer, your call. The second is that that the text service will not work. To save you checking, I tried it, and was sent a text message in response telling me that I had a voicemail message that turned out not to exist.

It's a minor example but this is happening day in, day out and we are paying for it: wasteful (£3.5million, that policing pledge campaign) and incompetent government that substitutes stunts for action. Why attack Sir Fred's £16million pension when the Government has done nothing to tackle the estimated £900 billion cost of public sector pensions - or even tell us the true size of that liability, which it no longer publishes?

If this administration is bereft of ideas and paralysed by fear, it is also cloaked in dishonesty. Ministers scratching their heads at the failure of consumer confidence to rally behind their financial bailouts must realise that the voters do not trust them, and therefore they will not start to spend.

Nothing will get better on Mr Brown's watch. Not even with the Pope on his side. Not even if he visits Mr Obama every week. Not even with a “partnership of purpose”. We need an election.

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