Gingrich stumbled almost immediately out of the gate, declaring in May on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the House Republican budget plan was too “radical” and represented “right-wing social engineering.”

As his campaign struggled to clean up that mistake — Gingrich took days to apologize to Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the budget’s author — the former House speaker was hit by the embarrassing revelation that he and his wife had once racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt at the luxury jeweler Tiffany & Co.

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Gingrich and his top aides insisted at the time that the botched rollout had not affected the candidate’s standing with voters, blaming instead the Washington “literati” for their predicament.

In late May, he dismissed the idea that his campaign had been struggling since fumbling an answer about his support for Ryan’s plan.

“The reports of my campaign’s death were greatly exaggerated,” Gingrich said.

But then, he virtually vanished from the scene, taking more than a week off from the campaign trail.

He was spotted over Memorial Day weekend strolling by himself and reading a Kindle in Old Town Alexandria. Then he left for the ill-timed vacation. His aides refused to say where he was, and his whereabouts were unknown until this week, when POLITICO revealed that Gingrich and his wife, Callista, were on a cruise in the Mediterranean.

Sources connected to Gingrich’s departed team said many of those who left pinned some of the blame for the candidate’s missteps on his wife.

“He does whatever she wants,” one source said, adding that the Greek cruise was long-scheduled and Gingrich didn’t feel he could put up an argument against it.

Another source gave the same account.

Morale on the campaign had plunged in recent weeks, with officials privately expressing uncertainty about how long the former speaker could survive in the race.

The internal divisions began to spill into public view last week. As POLITICO first reported, a longtime Gingrich loyalist in Iowa, Will Rogers, abruptly left the campaign. Soon after, Rogers publicly expressed concern about the lack of personal time Gingrich had invested in Iowa.

And word that Carney and Johnson would be leaving Gingrich’s campaign — and signing on with Perry — first surfaced this week even as sources familiar with their thinking denied any such plan.

Campaign aides met with Gingrich in the past few days to reconcile their differing visions, said a source close to the situation, but after a final meeting Thursday, it became clear they couldn’t reach any resolution

The staff’s final decision to quit was agreed upon, and group members collectively told Gingrich of their intentions at his Arlington, Va., campaign office.

Alexander Burns contributed to this report.