How the mid-term review didn’t quite hit the spot

Bearing in mind that the mid-term review was originally conceived as means of boosting Coalition morale after the collapse of Lords reform, it hasn’t done enormously well. With two more very awkward stories stemming from the review hitting the papers today, the exercise has left Downing Street in reactive mode, rather than functioning as the proactive promoter of proalition politics. These are the main problems with the review:

1. In trying to manage headlines about the review, Downing Street inadvertently created a slew of negative coverage by withholding the ‘audit’ of coalition achievements. The audit turned out to be a very boring and badly applied gloss (Ronseal quality control would have rejected it). Had it not been withheld, then accidentally revealed by Patrick Rock, journalists would have been unlikely to feast on it. It was already clear before Nick Clegg and David Cameron even arrived at their Downing Street press conference on Monday that the review wasn’t actually going to be a warts-and-all event: no-one was expecting a lengthy exposition of George Osborne’s failure to meet his debt target, or of the collapse of House of Lords reform.