David Cameron allegedly went home on the evening of May 10th and told his wife that he wouldn’t be Prime Minister. 24 hours later he was in Downing Street. Publicly the line was that it looked like things were going the other way, but behind the scenes things were rather different. Guido has come across a document drafted in the Cabinet Office on the Sunday afternoon that showed just how far the coalition negotiations had reached and crucially what the civil service were expecting.

By Sunday it was clear to Scott McPherson of the Economic and Domestic Affairs Secretariat who the two parties in government were going to be. Labour is not mentioned once in the entire document. He pinged this document around to the key players, including the Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell’s office. The whole document shows the great hand that the civil servants had in guiding the structure of the coalition agreement, with a big tip of the cap to New Zealand. Funny that three days before the deal was done the mandarins already knew the result…