This has certainly not been an annus horribilis for Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller. After all, she achieved her long-held ambition of becoming the leader of the People's National Party (PNP) and head of the Jamaican government. And Mrs. Simpson Miller remains personally popular, particularly among the broad mass of the Jamaican people.

But with issues such as the Trafigura Beheer affair, the intense scrutiny of her parliamentary doodling during a no-confidence debate in the Government, the tensions in the PNP over the selection of candidates and the public debate over her reportedly breaking appointments with the Pope and the President of the European Union, October has not been a particularly pleasant month for the Prime Minister. She is probably happy that it is at an end.

Yet the change in the calendar, as Mrs. Simpson Miller will appreciate, won't, in the absence of specific intervention, automatically mean a change in the objective circumstances and the problems facing the PM. So, tomorrow the issue will be the same: this sense of drift in the PNP and the perception that the Government is on autopilot.

The former is not our particular concern, except for the fact that in the case of a ruling party it has an impact on the latter, which affects national governance and the business of all the Jamaican people.

Clearly, therefore, Mrs. Simpson Miller is due for some hard and serious thinking and clear and firm decisions if her administration is to not just limp along with marginal achievements and she herself eventually find a spot in the pantheon of the potential might-have-beens.

In that regard, we offer the Prime Minister some free advice, portions of which have previously been proffered in these columns and ignored to her detriment.

Mrs. Simpson Miller will have to swallow hard in a reorganisation of her government, replacing loyal or trusted allies who are obviously not capable of the most critical jobs and not skilled in the art of statecraft. She will also have to show greater leadership in healing the lingering wounds from her PNP presidential contest, although this is a responsibility not only for her as the party leader.

In other words, Mrs. Simpson Miller will have to begin to play to her real strength, which, clearly, is not the minutiae of organisational management. What Mrs. Simpson Miller has in great abundance is charisma and the capacity to connect with people. These, essentially, are what brought her to the presidency of the PNP.

In office, Mrs. Simpson Miller has, it appears, attempted at once to be the technocratic and popular/populist leader, placing herself in an unaccustomed place where success was bound to be limited. What Mrs. Simpson Miller should perhaps consider is the transformation of her office into a sort of presidential position where she remains responsible for overall policy within the Government and the wider accountability of ministers and free to take on the sweep role of engagement with the Jamaican people. A deputy Prime Minister would be in charge of the day-to-day management of the Government, someone with the grasp of the intricacies of government and is not bored by detail.

This would demand bringing to the centre some of those sulking members who did not support Mrs. Simpson Miller's run for leadership, but in whom the requisite skills reside.