Ogden Nash must have anticipated John Harris’s book when he wrote his ditty:

The electorate has such delicate palates That they can find no one for whom to cast their ballots And when someone terrible gets elected They say: “There, that’s just what I expected.”

A disillusioned Labourite who signed his party membership card at the age of 15 — he calls it the secular equivalent of “confirmation” — Harris has watched with angst new Labour descend into pragmatism, privatisation, and privilege. Harris worries that Blair seems “to luxuriate in his role as George W. Bush’s most treasured PR prop” and he sternly admonishes us that it is our responsibility to punish the PM’s transgressions: “If a government screws up, it has to be held to account.”

But, alas, the Lib Dems have let Mr Harris down. It seems that “in the last two years” this party he might once have considered has taken “a marked stride to the Right” — and for Harris this is no compliment. He complains that the party makes him feel “uncomfortably muddled” and frets that a vote for Kennedy’s crew might open the door to Howard’s.

His conclusion? Well, not to give the ending away, but he doesn’t really have one. He suggests that it all depends on where you live. In a marginal district you’d better stick with Labour or the Tories might win. But in constituencies where Labour is likely to win handily, there are all sorts of vehicles that present themselves for a protest vote. Meanwhile, he fills his appendix with a list of suitable Labourites whose ideology meets his approval. But Harris seems to have forgotten that the appendix is a useless organ — leftist as they come, Labour MPs will still empower Blair and the sell-outs Harris so disdains.

But, for all his almost caricatured vitriol, there is something refreshing about Harris’s book. He has a clear, if outdated, ideology and a sharp sense of who he is and where he stands. Unsuitable as these traits may be in a politician, they are worth reading when they appear in a scribe.

But the irony of Harris’s harsh criticism of the forces of privilege and the defenders of wealth is that he has the wrong enemies. A lifetime of dissent has left him with a cast of adversaries that is as out-of-date as his thinking is in general. Indeed, he likely considers intellectual obsolescence as a kind of pedigree.

What Harris neglects is really venue. He rails against pro-choice policies in education and healthcare because he claims they permit elitism and leave inadequate services for the poor. He worries about those who cannot get into good hospitals or good schools. But he forgets — or has yet to learn — that Westminster isn’t where it’s at. Brussels is. The UK’s control over its own destiny is being shipped over the Channel so rapidly that the British voter increasingly has about as much practical power as the monarch herself. The very stultification of British politics of which Harris complains stems, in part, from the fact that 70 per cent of the laws passed by Parliament are, in fact, originated by the EU bureaucracy.

But every election witnesses the mass migration of the Red Top readers into the political process. Their numbers dwarf the more cultivated subscribers to this and other longer form organs, but, alas for the elites, it is still one person, one vote. To explain matters to these voters who only poke their heads above the ground as election day nears, Jonathan Maitland has written a guide to politics for the uninformed entitled: Vote for Who?

If you have just arrived from a lifetime in Outer Mongolia and want to get with what’s going on quickly and painlessly, Maitland is your man. In an easy-to-read and surprisingly insightful but blessedly short book, he summarises — and I do mean summarises — it all. Who holds power in the UK? How do politicians manage to spin their way to the top? What is the role of the average MP in government — he says they have “less power than a traffic warden”. Why do we have a two-party system? And, oh yes, why is the sky blue? He seems to make a good living writing such things as “the amount of power ministers have depends on . . . what department they are in charge of and their own personality and ability”. And, when it comes to his chapter on how to achieve political power as an average person he suggests a novel “option” — “kill yourself”. Despite what he admits are its “obvious drawbacks”, he notes approvingly of the suicide of suffragette Emily Davidson who was trampled to death by the King’s horse Anmer “as it was steaming toward the finishing line at the Derby”. (For those of fainter heart, he suggests writing to your local MP and living to tell about it.) In his tour d’horizon, Maitland does recognise what Harris does not: the looming power of Europe over the UK political process. But, in his breezy way, he lists the arguments pro and con and then moves on.

Elections bring forth books like these, a necessary concomitant of the potent cocktail of free ballots and a free press. But the frustration evident in Harris’s work lingers long after one closes its cover. Does the UK voter have a true choice? Do he or she have real options for change? Do the parties present these choices? Or has consensus politics and spin taken them away . . . and Europe eloped with what little was left?

Dick Morris is a longtime political consultant for Bill Clinton and now works as a political strategist for the UK Independence Party

What's more

• The Vote: How It Was Won, and How It Was Undermined by Paul Foot (Viking): the fight for universal suffrage, from the Civil War to the present
• Politico's Guide to the General Election by Simon Henig and Lewis Baston
• www.electionworld.org Global election database
• Enough is Enough or The Emergency Government by Mark Lawson (Picador): forthcoming political thriller focusing on Harold Wilson
• Election (Paramount DVD): wonderful high-school take on the politics of spin, directed by Alexander Payne, with Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy