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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Based on Philip Cowley's entertaining columns in The House magazine, this collection of political oddities and fascinating research, discussing the politics of fights, cockroaches, riots, potholes, beards and much more, is perfect for reading in multiple sittings. Discover the electoral relevance of chip shops and football grounds, what your lawn tells you about your voting, why politicians need to pay extra care in Scunthorpe, what MPs think of voters, why they all claim to be local and why they are all now so inexperienced. Equal parts witty and thought-provoking, and with additional grumpy complaints about bats, overly long constituency names and giving the vote to sixteen-year-olds, it's a book that will appeal to the sort of person who likes to tell you that, actually, it's all a bit more complicated than that…
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“It’s always worth reading the incomparable Philip Cowley. This delicious selection box of political insight you never guessed you needed will delight even the nerd who thinks they know everything.”
Patrick Maguire, chief political commentator, The Times
“A deep dive into the fascinating world of political esoterica, this invigorating book will explain politicians to their voters and vice versa – two groups who at times inhabit unparallel universes. All this from the pen of Britain’s doyen of political scientists, Philip Cowley, and drawn from the pages of the MP’s bible,The House magazine.”
Anthony Seldon, historian and author of TheImpossible Office? The History of the British Prime Minister
“To just call Philip Cowley one of Britain’s pre-eminent political scientists – which he is – is to (almost) miss the point. The genius ofthis tome is the way he combines cutting-edge academic insight withan understanding of how the political system actually works and thedeepest dive around on the psychology of voters. Few academics havegrasped the central insight that sets Cowley apart – people are at theheartofourpoliticalsystem,notstructures,rulesorhistory,andthisiswhatmakeshisworkajoy.Ontopofthis,combinehisloveoftrivia–onlyhewouldstartachapteranalysingwhichmotorwayservicestationsareinwhichconstituencies–withadrivefor truth-seekingandmyth-bustingandyou’vegotararecommodity:apoliticalbookthattravelswellbeyondthesmallestroominthehouse.Aseriousworkthateveryoneshouldenjoy.”
Sam Coates, deputy political editor, Sky News
“Moreentertainingthanithasanyrightto beandabsurdlyfullofnerdyfunfacts.”
Marie Le Conte, journalist and author of HonourableMisfits: A Brief History of Britain’s Weirdest, Unluckiest and Most Outrageous MPsii
“Random,wittyandwise,PhilipCowley’sproducedtheperfectpoliticalpickandmixwithThe Smallest Room in the House.”
Matt Chorley, BBC Radio 5 Live
“Thisbookmanagestobedaftandthoughtfulatthesametime.Highlyrecommended!”
Chris Mason, political editor, BBC News
“Thisbookwillmakeyoulookatpolitics,peopleandplacesdifferently.”
Stephen Bush, associate editor and columnist, Financial Times
“The Smallest Room in the House is a witty, incisive and endlesslyfascinating tour of the eccentricities of British politics. From theunexpected politics of fish and chips to beards and brawls, this bookunpacks the peculiarities of our political landscape with a perfect blend of nerdy insight and dry humour. This masterful guide to thequirksofBritishpoliticsisamust-readforanyonewhothinks politicsisdullandessentialreadingforeventhemost seasoned political observers.”
Mercy Muroki, columnist, The Sun
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This one’s for Maggie
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Contents
x
Introduction
People sometimes complain that the Palace of Westminster is intimidating and difficult to navigate. Just be grateful that it’s better than it used to be. Back in the 1990s, when I was there to interview MPs as a postgraduate student, I used to take in a packed lunch in my briefcase, and because there was then literally nowhere for visitors to eat, I would head to the gents toilet located off the Lower Waiting Hall, lock myself in a WC and wolf down a couple of sandwiches, as quickly as possible, before anyone began to wonder what exactly was going on in the cubicle. Don’t let anyone tell you that academic field work isn’t glamorous.
Despite a long-standing fascination with politics, I had realised in early adulthood that I would – for multiple reasons, most of them not to my credit – make a truly terrible politician. But if I couldn’t doit, maybe I could at least study it, teach it or write about it. Inexplicably, lunch on the khazi wasn’t enough to deter me – and I would spend much of the next thirty or so years xiiknocking around the Houses of Parliament as part of various research projects; equally inexplicably (or so it would have seemed to me when I was locked in the loo), people did indeed begin to ask me to write about the subject.
Most of the fifty chapters in this book began life as a column in TheHouse, Parliament’s fortnightly in-house magazine, which is sent to British MPs and peers. The column started in 2023 with the slightly pompous title ‘The Professor Will See You Now’. We called it that because we couldn’t think of anything better, even if it does sound a bit like a sexual harassment case waiting to happen. For all its flaws, the title did at least capture the basic idea behind the articles: I would take some topical, relevant or otherwise interesting piece of academic work on politics that had been published recently and try to explain it to the magazine’s readership.
‘You’ll run out of stuff to discuss,’ predicted a more cynical colleague as soon as the first column appeared. Thankfully, the problem was the opposite, and what was originally going to be an occasional column became a regular feature. About twenty articles in, it occurred to both me and the editor that there was probably a book in it. Here it is.
‘It’ll make a great loo book,’ declared James at Biteback – and while this might have dented my amour propre a little, he was right, as always. This is not a book to be read in one sitting. There’s no pretension here to any overarching theme. This isn’t like one of those books you see on the business shelf in xiiiWHSmith at Heathrow: SixLessonsThatWillChangetheWayYouSeetheWorld. Or even one of those 50ObjectsThatExplainBritaintomes. An honest subtitle would be something like RandomStuffThatInterestedtheAuthorWhenHisDeadlineWasApproaching. These are just fifty topics that seemed interesting to me when I sat down to write and I thought might be interesting to readers of the magazine – and now, with luck, to you. If you get through more than two chapters per visit then you need to eat more prunes.
The column was a pleasure to produce. The editors allowed me to focus on almost anything I wanted. I religiously stuck to the brief to publicise recent academic material (I use the word ‘recently’ thirty-one times in what follows), except on the many occasions when I didn’t. And the definition of ‘recent’ got stretched somewhat; several of the pieces I ended up discussing were published before I was born.
I took a series of early editorial decisions. None of the pieces of academic work discussed would be by me; I broke that rule in the very first article and on multiple occasions thereafter. I also decided at the outset that I would not use the column to criticise or slag off other people’s work. This seemed unfair, given that they had no right of reply, and also not in the collective good. The aim was to try to promote the many excellent academic studies that are regularly published on politics and which deserved a wider audience. If I didn’t think some piece of research was solid, I just wouldn’t talk about it. That rule I did stick to, xiveven if I sailed close to the wind on a few occasions. But for the most part, I saw the column as a chance to publicise the sort of research that, despite its quality, sits unread (or if not unread then maybe under-read?) in academic journals.
The choice of subject matter was determined mostly by the stuff I liked – which means a lot of process and not a lot of policy – but also with an eye to the sort of things I thought MPs might be interested in, which means there’s a lot in here on Parliament and elections. If it’s not discussed here, that doesn’t mean it’s not important; it just means that I didn’t write about it. There is, for example, nothing in here on how we cure life-threatening diseases or bring about world peace; that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t value them.
The original articles in TheHousemostly ran to about 600 words. I’ve taken the opportunity of this book to expand each piece slightly, often including material that had ended up on the cutting-room floor. I’ve also updated some of the articles in the process and occasionally corrected errors that had been spotted by eagle-eyed readers. None of the chapters is identical to the article originally published. Equally, though, none of them is all that different. They remain very short essays, offering snapshots into the issues discussed. If you want more, there is a brief further reading section at the end of each chapter.
Nine of the chapters began life elsewhere, albeit in a very different form. But the rest are all from TheHouse. From the beginning, I’ve been grateful for all the team there for their support. xvRosa Prince took a punt on the original idea and Alan White, Francis Elliott and Sally Dawson edited with charm and style.
Rereading en masse what were originally separate and ephemeral pieces brings your stylistic foibles into sharp focus. Too much Latin. Too much Wodehouse. I’ve tried to tone both down here. I use some words far too frequently; ‘fascinating’ is an obvious weakness of mine. And the effects of having had two born-again grandparents – one ran a Christian bookshop and the other would spend his spare time pounding the streets of Newquay proselytising – came through in the number of biblical references I realised I use. (At one point, I had made the same joke about John the Baptist twice.) So again, I have toned that down a little.
Those same grandparents would, however, have been horrifiedby the various rude words that have crept in. When I am on my deathbed and my grandchildren ask me what I am most proud of in life, I will summon up all my remaining energy, pull them close and whisper in their ears: ‘I got the Scunthorpe gag in Chapter 26 into The House magazine.’
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Chapter 1
Trust
The latest data on the level of trust in various professions makes salutary reading for the political class. In the most recent Ipsos poll, for example, just 18 per cent of people said they trusted politicians to tell the truth. Of the twenty-six professions about which the survey asked, politicians came bottom.
Actually, that’s not true. The 18 per cent figure is from when the survey was first conducted in 1983. More than forty years ago – before anyone had heard of sleaze, or Iraq, or MPs’ expenses, or Covid or whatever else has been used to explain our lack of trust in politicians – MPs were already down there with estate agents and journalists.
Since then, the veracity score for politicians has gone as high as 23 per cent, which isn’t very high, and as low as 9 per cent, which is very low. The figure from the most recent poll, last year, was 11 per cent.
The figure for government ministers is only slightly higher, at 15 per cent. For reasons I have never really understood, when 2this question was first asked, ministers polled worse than politicians in general. From 2000 onwards, ministers polled better than politicians. Answers on a postcard, please.
The same poll, by the way, finds that 85 per cent think professors are trustworthy – a figure that only leads me to conclude most people haven’t actually met a professor.
This is not to say that there isn’t a problem with trust in politicians or engagement with politics – but it is one reason why it is best to be wary of politicians who talk of their desire to regain the trust of the British people. You can’t regain something you never had in the first place.
Still, just because things were bad before doesn’t mean they are not getting worse – as demonstrated by my hairline. Some new research, just published in the BritishJournalofPoliticalScience, attempts to test this systematically. It examined levels of trust in three representative institutions – Parliament, government and political parties – along with three of what they term ‘implementing’ institutions – the civil service, the legal system and the police. It draws on data from almost 3,400 separate surveys across 143 countries between 1958 and 2019. That’s more than 5 million data points. It’s the sort of big data research that makes us lesser mortals feel inadequate.
The stats are quite complicated – they use Bayesian dynamic latent trait models, if you are interested – but the overall findings are not. There is clear evidence of a decline in trust in representative institutions across the world. Trust in parliaments, 3for example, has gone down by around 9 percentage points in democracies between 1990 and 2019.
By contrast, trust in implementing organisations has remained pretty constant or even gone upwards. Over that same time period, trust in the police, for example, has trended upwards by about 13 percentage points. That is presumably because there are never any scandals involving the police.
It’s a fascinating paper, packed with findings; the online appendices include 142 pages of supplementary information. If you’ve ever wondered whether people in Lithuania have become more or less trusting of the police since 1990, then this is the research for you. (Spoiler: the answer is more.)
These trends are not uniform. There are countries in which trust in, say, their parliament has stayed broadly the same. But the level of trust has risen in just six democracies, of which the most populous is Ecuador (population: < 20 million). The trends are also not linear. This means that in any one country, at any one point in time, it might look as if what is happening is just trendless fluctuation. But seen en masse like this, the global patterns become more obvious.
This presents an interesting challenge. Do you, as an academic or practitioner, look at the fact that some countries have bucked the trends and say to yourself, channelling Jim Carrey in DumbandDumber, ‘You’re telling me there’s a chance?’ Or do you accept that you are on the wrong side of a global wave of discontent and there’s probably not a lot you can do about it?
4What of the UK? Here, things are perhaps not quite what you might expect. For one thing, the research reveals no long-term decline in trust in the three implementing organisations. Trust in the police, for example, had been falling but is now back to roughly the same levels as in 1990. Ditto for trust in political parties, which seems basically unchanged.
The authors report trust in government in the UK to have fallen but describe the situation with trust in Westminster as ‘borderline’. As my grandmother used to say, thank heaven for small mercies.
‘Borderline’, just to be clear, is on the downside – that is, somewhere between trust being constant and trust falling – rather than on the upside. Digging into the data a bit more, it looks as if trust in both Parliament and government in the UK have slightly declined over the last thirty or so years. In one case (government), it’s fallen by a difference that is statistically significant, and in the other (Parliament), by an amount that just fails to make statistical significance, hence the borderline. But the substantive effects are pretty similar.
It’s probably best not to be too celebratory about it. For one thing, this research was looking at trends, not absolute levels. As the data at the start of the chapter indicated, trust in politicians in the UK was already pretty low; it didn’t have all that far to fall. And it is now being classed as borderline. No one has ever thrown a party to celebrate being borderline.5
Furtherreading
V. Valgarðsson et al., ‘A Crisis of Political Trust? Global Trends in Institutional Trust from 1958 to 2019’, BritishJournalofPoliticalScience(2025). 6
Chapter 2
Chips
Did you know that none of the motorway service stations along the M4 is in a Conservative-held constituency? From Pont Abraham in Carmarthenshire to Heston in West London (‘Only a fool would stop at Heston,’ as Nessa says in Gavin&Stacey), all eleven service stations are in either Labour or Lib Dem seats. You might well respond that I need to get out more, but then it was getting out more that got me here in the first place. I sat the other day having a break at Leigh Delamere, wondering both what constituency I was in and how it ever became legal to charge that much for a cup of coffee.
Or take football grounds, something else I’ve been tracking for a while. After 2019, Premier League grounds were overwhelmingly in Labour-held constituencies that voted Remain. Once you dropped into the Championship, the Labour dominance continued, but with the majority of grounds in Leave-voting constituencies. By League One, the Labour dominance had gone and grounds were mainly in Leave-voting seats. This remained 8true for League Two and the National League. In the Premier League, 75 per cent of clubs were found in Labour-held seats; by time you got to the National League, the figure was just 25 per cent. In the Premier League, 70 per cent of grounds were in Remain-voting constituencies; in the National League, 67 per cent were in Leave-voting constituencies.
Just in case it’s not blindingly obvious, the causal link here is not that voting Labour or Remain causes your football team to get better, but rather that Premier League clubs are mostly in big cities and big cities largely voted Remain and (even in 2019) return Labour MPs. As you move down the leagues, you get smaller cities and towns, which are more likely to be Conservative and/or Leave-voting.
In England and Wales, at least, things got a lot easier to explain after 2024, because there was just one football league club in a Conservative-held constituency (Bromley, if you’re interested). Barnet’s return to the football league in 2025 made it two. That’s also quite revealing in its own way. You have to dip into non-league football before things get a bit more varied, as they now are in Scotland.
In a similar vein, a switched-on Labour MP once told me that UKIP, as then was, did well in places where you could get good fish and chips. I nodded politely at the time, but a new research paper published in the journal Geoforumhas tested something similar, examining the relationship between the prevalence of fish and chip shops in an area and voting patterns in the 2016 9Brexit referendum, and it turns out that Labour MP was on to something.
You have to love research in which someone has written ‘no study has examined the relationship between Brexit and fish and chips’ – it’s reminiscent of that bit in LuckyJimin which Dixon ponders the phrase ‘considering this strangely neglected topic’ – and where the researchers have downloaded a database of restaurants from yell.com, where there are, just like Heinz, fifty-seven varieties. But, like football grounds or service stations, it turns out chip shops offer a good insight into electoral geography.
The most common food outlets in the UK are generic fast-food places; next comes Indian restaurants, with fish and chip shops or restaurants in third. Chippies are not the main type of outlet in any London constituency; the paper contains some fascinating maps, including one of London that shows Italian restaurants predominate in the centre, surrounded by a ring of constituencies where generic takeaways dominate, and then an outer ring of constituencies where Indian restaurants are the most common, a bit like the M25 circling London. (Three of the four service stations on the M25 are in Conservative-held seats, in case you were wondering.)
But chippies dominate elsewhere outside of the capital – along various bits of the south coast, around Cardiff, on the edges of the central belt in Scotland – and the researchers identify a ‘fish and chip wall’ of English constituencies, a contiguous area 10running from Southport to Scarborough to Whitby, where the chip shop is king.
In Yorkshire and the Humber, the region where they are most common, chip shops make up a fifth of all restaurants. Here, the Leave share of the vote was 58 per cent. In London, where chippies make up under 8 per cent of restaurants, the Leave share was 40 per cent. A more sophisticated analysis finds that the relationship holds at constituency level: the greater the preponderance of chip shops, the higher the Leave vote.
A secondary analysis compares the Brexit vote with a measure of restaurant diversity. It finds the opposite effect: the Leave vote share goes down as restaurants become more diverse. Ditto for a separate test for Japanese restaurants. The authors’ surnames are Pickering and Tanaka, if you were wondering about their choices of cuisines to test.
What’s interesting here, though, is that the chip shop isn’t just a proxy for other, easily controlled, variables. The chip-shop effect remains, even after controlling for other demographics. Restaurants, the authors note, are ‘behavioural proxies’, which reflect broader cultural and political contexts. We are what we eat.
A coda: if cuisine isn’t your thing, another new research paper, just published in PoliticalStudies, examines the effects of social mobility on the Brexit vote. Living in an area on the up, compared to one that wasn’t, was associated with almost 7 percentage points difference in the Leave vote in 2016. This effect held 11regardless of one’s own social mobility. As the researchers write: ‘Individuals see how neighbours, colleagues, family members and friends, who tend to live in close vicinity, fare.’ They vote according to how the people surrounding them are faring, not how socially mobile they have been. We are also where we live.
Furtherreading
A. McNeil and P. Sturgis, ‘Does Local Area Social Mobility Affect Political Alienation?’, Political Studies (2024).
S. Pickering and S. Tanaka, ‘A taste for deprivation? Fish, chips and leaving the European Union’, Geoforum(2025). 12
Chapter 3
Dullards
‘Why don’t you write something about that study that found Leave voters were less intelligent than Remain voters?’ said someone who, up until that point, I had always considered to be a friend.
It’s such an incendiary topic that my initial view was that it would be more pleasant to cover my genitals with honey before sticking them in a beehive. But on reflection, maybe it’s a useful exercise, because of the finding itself but also because of what it tells you about how to interpret these sorts of studies.
To summarise: the research asked people to complete five tests of cognitive ability, measuring reasoning, fluency and so on. How many words could they recall from a list? How many animals could they name in a minute? How good was their subtraction? Could they fill in the blank in a sequence of numbers? How was their numerical reasoning?
On average, those who voted Remain scored higher on these measures than those who voted Leave. Plus, as cognitive ability 14scores increased, so did the likelihood of voting Remain. Of those whose cognitive ability scores put them in the bottom 10 per cent, some 40 per cent voted Remain; for those in the top decile, the figure was about 73 per cent.
The dataset consisted of around 6,000 individuals from 3,000 or so couples. Researchers found that while most couples voted the same way, in the 14 per cent of cases where there was intra-couple disharmony, the higher-scoring partner was more likely to have voted Remain. This last finding is especially interesting, because couples will for the most part be exposed to the same environment and external stimuli – and because, in the words of the paper, ‘in the spirit of assortative mating, individuals within couples are likely to be similar to each other in other observable ways’.
A useful first question to ask is whether a study seems pukka. This one drew on the well-established Understanding Society survey, a nationally representative and large-scale survey carried out each year. It wasn’t based on six people the authors met down the pub. Plus, it appeared in a peer-reviewed outlet – that is, one in which the work was read by other experts in the field before publication. Peer review is absolutely not a guarantee of quality – some shockers do occasionally sneak through – but it’s still useful at filtering out obviously flawed studies.
None of that means we should treat the findings as gospel, but it does mean we can at least give them some credibility. As part of that process, for example, you might expect reviewers 15to consider whether the study had considered other factors that might be explaining the results, and indeed they had.
Second, always ask yourself: is this at least plausible? Here (and at the risk of getting bombarded with hate mail) the answer is yes, not least because it’s not the only study to have claimed to have found this effect. We know both age and education are important factors in determining attitudes towards Brexit, and cognitive functions decline with age while increasing with educational attainment. (For the avoidance of doubt, while education and intelligence are not the same – as anyone working in a university is painfully aware – they are not entirely unrelated either.) Given all this, it would, I think, be surprising if there weren’t somedifferences in cognitive functions between Leavers and Remainers.
This particular piece of research claims to have found something more than this, however – that is, differences in cognitive functions above and beyond those you would expect based on other demographics. But the core finding is perhaps not all that surprising.
Yet the key thing with research papers like this is always to consider the size of the difference and to remember that such findings are almost always probabilistic, not absolutes. If I told you that nine-year-olds are taller on average than eight-year-olds, a) no one would be shocked and b) no one would think I was claiming that allnine-year-olds were taller than alleight-year-olds. This is obvious when dealing with something prosaic 16like height but always seems to get overlooked when discussing anything more controversial, like politics.
This research isn’t claiming that all Leavers had low levels of cognitive ability or that all Remainers shone. In fact, the research paper itself is clear about the fact that there are significant overlaps between the two groups. Just over a third of Leave voters, for example, had higher cognitive ability than the average Remain voter. There were plenty of sharp Leavers and plenty of dullard Remainers.
Or take the intra-couple differences. Where they disagreed, the highest-scoring one was about 10 per cent more likely to vote Remain. That’s a non-trivial effect, but it still means there were lots of couples where the Leaver was the bright spark and the Remainer was a bit slower on the uptake.
I don’t, for the record, especially like the way the paper is framed, with this higher average level of cognitive ability enabling brighter Remainers to see through the Leave campaign’s more dodgy claims. Yes, it’s true that people with higher cognitive functions are more likely to be able to see through misinformation (although, again, this is relative – lots of supposedly clever people fall for misinformation all the time), but this implies that only one side in the Brexit referendum made dubious claims, which is a curious way to remember the events of 2016.
I also struggle slightly with the normative implications. It’s an interesting finding, but so what? This sort of study seems to appeal to a certain type of passionate Remainer who struggles 17with the fact that they lost the referendum and is always looking for other people to blame. Successful politicians work with the electorate they are given, not the one they wished they had.
Regardless, the research itself looks kosher. Now, where’s that beehive?
Furtherreading
C. Dawson and P. Baker, ‘Cognitive ability and voting behaviour in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership’, PLoS ONE (2023).18
Chapter 4
+/-3
Every election, the optimist in me hopes that it will be a contest in which opinion polls are properly reported. The pessimist in me knows that pollsters and journalists need the cash and clicks that come with overhyping poll findings.
Most informed observers – readers of this book, say – know that opinion polls come with uncertainty built in. For most standard opinion polls in the UK, the margin of error (MoE) is plus or minus 3 percentage points. In other words, if a poll puts a party on 40 per cent, it means their actual level of support is somewhere between 37 and 43 per cent. Its scale may vary occasionally (and it’s slightly more complicated than this simplified version makes out), but MoE is an ever-present fact of polling life.
The consequences of it are often less understood. When comparing changes over time, the uncertainty applies to both the current and the past figure. To take a recent example, after 20the 2023 Autumn Statement, TheTimesreported that according to YouGov, Conservative support had risen by 4 points compared to the last poll by the same company. Pre-statement, the Conservatives were on 21 per cent; afterwards, they polled 25 per cent. That could have been a 4-point jump in support as a favourable reaction to the policies announced, which is how it got written up. But that 4-point poll increase would also be perfectly consistent with actual support for the Conservatives having been stable at 22, 23, or 24 per cent – or even having fallen slightly (24 per cent before, 22 per cent after). And indeed, once a few more polls were published, that more sober assessment seemed to be correct. Any apparent bounce from the Autumn Statement vanished and Conservative spirits sank again.
