The shaky campaign of Ségolène Royal for the French presidency took a fresh hit today after her senior economic adviser resigned amid growing Socialist dismay over her failure to revive her run for the Elysée Palace.

Ms Royal’s team was locked in a “spiral of depression” after the latest embarrassment hit her once once-flawless campaign, said Le Monde. Adding to the Socialist woes in advance of the April 22 first-round vote, Ms Royal, 53, was booed by schoolchildren on a visit to a sports ground on Tuesday and is being deserted by stars of the intellectual world, a traditional bastion of the Left.

As Nicolas Sarkozy, 52, candidate for the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement, retained a clear lead over Ms Royal in opinion polls, the Socialists sought to play down the departure of Eric Besson, the party’s chief of economic policy.

The MP walked out on Tuesday in a feud with François Hollande, the party chief and Ms Royal’s domestic partner, over the 100-point manifesto that Ms Royal unveiled on Sunday.

Ms Royal ordered her team to focus on promoting the generous financial measures that she was promising without being pinned down on their funding.

Mr Besson, Mr Hollande and the others came under media pressure to produce figures after Ms Royal’s failed to mention costs while preaching the urgency of curbing the national debt. They produced the figure of 35 billion extra euros per annum and Mr Besson amplified the detail.

Mr Hollande rounded on Mr Besson for this yesterday and he resigned on the spot complaining about disorganisation and incoherence in the campaign, party sources said.

The incident has reinforced the image of disarray in a campaign in which Ms Royal and her close staff have kept a distance from the Socialist machine and failed to recruit her former party rivals in her cause. Tension between Mr Hollande and his partner is also troubling the campaign, insiders say.

Mr Besson’s departure was a sign “at best of tensions in Royal’s team, at worst of persistent malfunctions in the co-ordination of her campaign,” said Libération, which supports Ms Royal and had seen her Sunday speech as her redemption. In another fumble this week, the campaign retracted an article under Ms Royal’s name which it had supplied to Temoignage Chretien magazine. The piece, which was scathing about President Chirac’s highly personal conduct of relations with Africa, had not been “authorised” by the candidate, her campaign said.

The amateurism of the Royal staff has been gleefully seized upon by the Sarkozy team, a well-oiled war machine in comparison. Visiting the French Indian Ocean island of La Réunion, Mr Sarkozy quipped today: “She shouldn’t change a single thing. If you cannot rally your own family, you can hardly rally all the French.” Mr Sarkozy’s office in Paris said the Socialists’ squabble over economic plans was proof that they lacked credibility.

The sense of a Sarkozy momentum has been reinforced by polls which show that, despite media praise for her performance, Ms Royal has not achieved the hoped-for bounce.

Jean-Daniel Lévy, of the CSA institute, said the French had viewed Ms Royal’s manifesto speech as a catalogue of left-wing promises rather than a vision. Voters have a stronger understanding of Mr Sarkozy’s entrepreneurial vision of a France in which “you work more to earn more”.

The Socialists are worried about polling figures which show that overall support for left-wing candidates in the first round is at its lowest for years, despite the unpopularity of the centre-right Chirac administration.

Jean-Louis Bianco, joint campaign director for Ms Royal, admitted that “the Left is extremely weak in the first round ... There has to be a [new] campaign dynamic.”

Pollsters say it is too early to write off Ms Royal. Jean-Luc Parodi, head of the centre for studies of French political life, said it would take a week more to determine the true impact of Ms Royal’s Sunday manifesto. Her next chance to win support comes on Monday when she will be questioned by 100 members of the public in a two-hour television session.

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