The Politicos Guide to the New House of Commons 2015: Profiles of the New MPs and Analysis of the 2015 General Election Results

The Politicos series of guides is a newer – and cheaper – series than the venerables Times guides which come out after each general election. Those latter books justly have a very strong reputation for comprehensive factual coverage of the constituency results and MP biographies. Wisely, the Politicos series does not compete head on and instead – in addition to leaving more money in your wallet after purchase – has a greater emphasis on analysis by a range of authors.

Hence this 2015 guide does not give a complete set of constituency results, nor biographies of all MPs. Just the new 2015 MPs are included (182 out of the full 650 complement) – and some of their biographies are rather brief and overly reliant on what an MP wishes to say about themselves. Returning Labour MP Dawn Butler, for example, escapes any mention of her high profile and controversial expense claims in her previous incarnation as an MP whilst even Boris Johnson has a rather bland write-up shorn of the sort of lively controversies that are his usual stock in trade.

What this guide does have, however, is an excellent series of regional essays summarising the election results and pulling out great individual stories which make the overall picture vividly stick in your mind, as with the one sentence on Cardiff North which starkly sums up Labour’s 2015 disaster: “[Labour] made precisely no gains from the Tories [in Wales], not even in Cardiff North, a constituency with a high level of public sector workers, where the Conservatives had a majority of just 194 in 2010 and no incumbent MP this time.”

There are also a series of essays by a range of experts of which the most interesting is Peter Riddell’s on the workings of the fixed-term Parliaments Act and the one most likely to raise the hackles of some readers is the pungent David Torrance on Scotland. Throw in a large number of tables summarising different aspects of the election and this all makes for a good guide, if one that has a few too many gaps and a little too much variability to be your one-stop 2015 results book.

If you like this, you might also be interested in Order! Order! A Parliamentary Miscellany.

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Buy The Politicos Guide to the New House of Commons 2015: Profiles of the New MPs and Analysis of the 2015 General Election Results, edited by Tim Carr, Iain Dale and Robert Waller here.

Note: a review copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher.