(HarperCollins, £50)
The Times Guide to the House of Commons used to be the Wisden of British electoral politics. Psephologists sometimes muttered that it was too hastily produced and therefore prone to error. But if you wanted to find out the "correlation of forces" (as Soviet publications might have termed it) in a particular constituency, the Times Guide supplied the basics.
After the 2001 general election, however, something funny happened on the way to the printer. Under new editorship, all the CVs of the losing candidates disappeared; only the winners were included. Instead of the easily tabulated results—whereby incumbent MPs were listed in bold and with stars next to their names—now only the winner appears in bold. The stars have also gone. This makes it far harder to tell, at a glance, whether a seat has swapped hands.
What do we gain in exchange? Eighty-word profiles of each constituency of almost comic banality. Thus, "Cambridge is famous as being home to one of the two most prestigious universities in England." And the editors assure us that Brighton Kemptown has a "vibrant gay community" (my emphasis). What about Britain's sleepy gay communities? Don't they deserve a mention?
All this reminds me of the start of Laurie Lee's As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: as the teenager sets off for civil war-era Spain, he realises that everything he knows about the country is true but useless—such as the fact that Seville has a barber. And by ditching the CVs of the losers, the Times Guide has forfeited one of its key functions: charting the changing nature of the political classes. Are more university lecturers and fewer manual workers coming up the Labour party system in "hopeless" seats? Is there a revival of the number of old Etonians in the ranks of Tory parliamentary aspirants?
But the losing candidates are not the only casualties. Where have those clear tables at the end of the Guide gone? No more lists of seats with the most marginal results for each party or the alphabetical roll call of retirees. Instead, there has been an explosion of frothy, discursive essays with subtitles such as "Confessions of a Parliamentary Sketchwriter."
Indeed, as suggested by the title of one article—"Some Left Quite Willingly And Others Did Not"—retiring MPs are now mixed up with losing MPs. Is this list comprehensive? It is hard to tell. Quite wrongly, the author of that contribution asserts that David Trimble was the first sitting party leader rejected by the electorate since 1931. What about Ramsay MacDonald of National Labour in 1935, Archibald Sinclair of the Liberals in 1945, Harry West of the UUP in October 1974, Gwynfor Evans of Plaid Cymru in 1979 and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein in 1992?
At £50, this is poor value. I would like to say that it does not matter: there is, after all, competition now, including The Almanac of British Politics by Robert Waller and Byron Criddle, and The Political Map of Britain by Simon Henig and Lewis Baston. But these works—with proper constituency profiles worthy of Michael Barone's path-breaking The Almanac of American Politics—tend not to be available just after an election.
So, for the moment, we are stuck with the Times Guide. It further reflects the trend identified by Charles Moore at the time of the US presidential election last November: from BBC election night coverage you could learn everything about the "mood" of America, but data on the actual returns on a state-by-state basis was much harder to come by. The statistical core has been diluted so that journalists can strut their stuff.
