Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary and Gordon Brown's closest political ally, calls today in his interview with The Times for an end to the “indulgent nonsense” that has lately swept the Labour Party. His colleagues should instead, he insists, be working flat out for victory in the local elections. His argument might be rational but it is destined to pass unheeded. This has been an extraordinary fortnight during which the old convention that a parliamentary recess represents a respite for the government of the day has been upended. The level of hostile briefing, open dissent from the obscure likes of Lord Desai yesterday and the stark collective fatalism that has been on display is astonishing and damaging. Barely a month ago, Labour was a modest three points behind in the opinion polls and slowly if unspectacularly closing in on the Conservatives. Now it is all at sea.

If it feels bad for the Prime Minister, it is certain to become worse still. The month ahead has “misery” written through it like a word in a stick of rock. Labour MPs have been stunned at the backlash among their constituents at the abolition of the 10p tax band and one of their ranks has resigned as a parliamentary private secretary in protest. Yet as (bad) luck would have it, they will be required to vote for this measure in the House of Commons at the end of this month. A few days later, voters will go to the polls for the local elections, where Labour faces the prospect of heavy losses nationally and the possible rejection of Ken Livingstone in London. After that body blow, the Government will then ask for support in its controversial (doomed?) attempt to increase the allowable period of detention without trial from the current 28 days to 42 days.

Ministers will not be able to claim, come the close of May, that any of this was a surprise to them. What they require instead is a coherent strategy that is designed to limited the damage.

This is far from a straightforward enterprise. The difficulties that the scrapping of the 10p tax band create should have been foreseen. A day after the 2007 Budget, this newspaper noted that Mr Brown's switch in personal taxation had been framed in such a way that “poorer taxpayers, in particular single people, are worse off”. This could only, it was asserted, be offset if “this Chancellor or the next were to raise the threshold at which income tax applied” by April 2008.

Neither Mr Brown nor Alistair Darling heeded that message or took that opportunity. The best that they can say to aggrieved backbench MPs (who themselves should have spotted this coming) is that they will not make the same mistake in the Pre-Budget Report this year. As for the local elections, Labour has little choice but to throw all the resources that it can into London in the hope that a triumph there would overshadow the embarrassment that is bound to occur outside the capital. That Mr Brown should find himself so dependent on Mr Livingstone, whom he has loathed for decades, is ironic, but politics is a paradoxical profession. The Cabinet might also ask itself whether it would be more sensible and less humiliating to abandon or vastly scale back the 42-day detention scheme at a moment of its choosing than to plough on to a Commons debacle.

Mr Balls believes that administrations such as that in which he serves only lose elections when they have mishandled the economy, are divided among themselves and have lost touch with the concerns of the electorate. He is right about this. The next month will demonstrate how close the Government is to satisfying these conditions.