If there is one big lesson for David Cameron and Nick Clegg from the American mid-term elections, it remains the one set out so memorably by Bill Clinton during the 1992 US presidential race: it’s the economy, stupid.

The first six months of the Cameron/Clegg partnership have seen a helter skelter of policies spew out from the Coalition Government.

But all the reforms will reap no electoral reward if the Government hasn’t turned the economy around by 2015, or at least rebuilt the foundations sufficiently for all to see.

There has been a lot of criticism, especially from Tea Party candidates, of Barack Obama’s Gordon Brown-style Big Government, but most analysts agree that the principal reason for the Democrats’ decline on Wednesday was the faltering state of the US economy.

Every family in America has within it or knows someone who has lost their job or is in danger of losing it.

There will be uncomfortable elections ahead, starting next spring, for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. That will be grit-your-teeth times for Cameron, Clegg & Co.

***

On the subject of going to the polls, Montgomeryshire MP Glyn Davies blogs about the lack of debate in the build-up to the referendum on extra powers for the Welsh Assembly on March 3 next year.

Not a date, we suspect, that has found its way into many Welsh forward planners.

The Tory MP points out that the people of Wales will (or won’t) be making their way to polling stations “just eight weeks after we resurface following Christmas and the New Year”.

Now installed as parliamentary aide to Welsh Secretary Cheryl Gillan, Mr Davies says he hasn’t changed his mind on being positive about the proposed changes, but points out that he is now supposed to be officially neutral.

“I’m quite comfortable with this, because much the biggest job will be persuading people to take a bit of interest in it, and turn out to vote,” he said.

Mr Davies is keen to organise some public meetings in Montgoneryshire to air the issues, opining that discussions in the TV studio “usually shed more heat than light”.

***

Mark Pritchard led a large group of people through the Members’ Lobby in the House of Commons on Wednesday on their way upstairs to the gallery to watch Prime Minister’s Question Time. As The Tory MP introduced me to one of the party, I wondered out loud: “Members of the Wrekin Conservative Association, I presume?”

Met with a look of puzzlement, I realised that I had made a mistake, and that, as deputy chairman of the Conservative International Office, Mr Pritchard was probably supervising foreign visitors.

When I saw him a little later, I asked: “Who was that you introduced me to earlier?”

The Wrekin MP replied: “Well, you were partly right. He is a conservative.” It was the President of Albania, Bamir Topi. “It’s not every day that you meet a president,” Mr Pritchard added.

Norman Wisdom would have known who he was.

***

Who on earth had the bright idea to put David Cameron’s personal “vanity” photographer and a Tory filmmaker on the public payroll at £35,000 each?

Andy Coulson, whose £140,000 salary as the Prime Minister’s top media strategist is paid by the taxpayer, should have seen this own goal coming before the ball reached the half-way line. It was a gift to Ed Miliband in Question Time on Wednesday, leaving Mr Cameron distinctly embarrassed. And rightly so.