For a man who was famous for rarely apologising for anything, Gordon Brown is swiftly learning the art of saying sorry.

Had the latest Labour funding crisis broken in the summer when Mr Brown was riding high, he would probably have closed it down with the resignation of Peter Watt, the party’s general secretary, and moved on seamlessly to the next natural disaster . . . floods, foot-and-mouth, bluetongue, whatever.

But the problems that have piled up for him since he allowed speculation of an early election to mount and then called it off are political and not caused by the weather or viruses.

Only a week ago Mr Brown was apologising for the personal details of 25 million people being lost in the post. Northern Rock’s problems were not of the Government’s making and the rescue efforts were generally supported but did anyone really expect the Bank of England to lend the institution £24 billion?

The reason Mr Brown is now so damaged is that the central planks of his appeal to the electorate – competence, trust, cleaning up politics – look threadbare after the latest astonishing turn of events. The cumulative impact of the misfortunes befalling Mr Brown has left his party in despair and reminded all at Westminster of the dying years of the Major Government. Mr Brown’s attempted “relaunch” at the CBI on Monday was holed below the waterline even before it got under way. Yesterday the fourth “middle person” used by David Abrahams to channel cash to Labour, a Janet Dunn, turned out not to have known anything about it. What’s more she and her husband are Tory voters. You could not make it up.

Mr Brown stated that he knew nothing until Saturday night – he was in Kampala at the Commonwealth summit – about the weird practice of a big donor using associates to fund Labour, in clear breach of electoral law.

The leader who for years has been labelled a control freak was looking startlingly as if he was not in charge of events inside his own party.

Mr Brown, to be fair, made no attempt to play down the scale of the funding calamity, and did what he had to do. He promised to return the £600,000 – money that his party desperately needs to keep paying the staff bills – to Mr Abrahams, and announced the umpteenth inquiry of his short reign, with a former bishop and retired judge advising him on how to clean up the donation process.

But the questions left last night were greater than before. Downing Street said that Mr Brown’s support for Harriet Harman was “unambiguous”. But in taking money from another of the “middle persons”, Janet Kidd, for her deputy leadership campaign, Ms Harman clearly acted unwisely at best. Her action contrasted uncomfortably with that of Hilary Benn, another deputy candidate, and Mr Brown himself, whose campaign teams rejected the offer of cash. She, too, is paying back the money, but did she ask enough questions about its provenance?

We were told that Mr Benn refused an offer of cash from Mrs Kidd on the advice of Baroness Jay of Paddington, the former Cabinet minister, who was a member of a special vetting committee set up in 2002 to have a special look at donations over £5,000. She apparently knew that the money was being given on behalf of Mr Abrahams.

If this was known to Lady Jay it is strange, to say the least, that no one else at the top of the party, apart from the hapless former general secretary, will admit being aware of this idiosyncratic funding stream.

Mr Brown appears to have an unshakeable belief in his ability to get himself and his party out of the mess they are now in. His mantra is to focus on the long term where Labour, and not its opponents, will prove to have the answers. But for the moment his nightmare is the short term. If it gets any worse than this, he may find the mountain ahead of him is too big to climb.

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