A tip, Mr Kennedy, if you want to be more than a spectator...

At half past seven in the evening last Wednesday I tried to telephone the Government Whips' office, only to be told that the House had risen at 16.32 and that there was no one there. Loafers! - not to say flâneurs and possibly even boulevardiers. Why do they think we pay them those colossal sums of money? In fact it was an impulsive call on my part, though that does nothing to justify the closing down of Parliament in the middle of a November afternoon. I wanted to find something out, and from time to time pursue my inquiries, as the mood takes me.

At half past seven in the evening last Wednesday I tried to telephone the Government Whips' office, only to be told that the House had risen at 16.32 and that there was no one there. Loafers! - not to say flâneurs and possibly even boulevardiers. Why do they think we pay them those colossal sums of money? In fact it was an impulsive call on my part, though that does nothing to justify the closing down of Parliament in the middle of a November afternoon. I wanted to find something out, and from time to time pursue my inquiries, as the mood takes me.

I was brought up to believe that in articles - even more so in books - the scaffolding should have been taken down. The process by which some information had been acquired could have been fascinating to the writer but was of little interest to anyone else. Though there were a few classic works which breached this principle, such as The Quest for Corvo, on the whole it was adhered to. Now, however, it is violated all the time, in the interests of intimacy and self-revelation. Indeed, there are certain well-regarded pieces of writing which are all scaffolding and no building at all.

What all this is leading up to is that for the past six months or so, possibly longer, I have been engaged in my own quest: to track down the instrument (to use lawyers' language) which reduces the number of parliamentary constituencies from 659 to 646, the diminution having been brought about by the loss of 13 seats in Scotland. This means that, come the election, the winning party will, to possess an absolute majority, have to secure 324 seats rather than the present 330.

Those set in authority over us, and many who have no authority at all but like to dabble in these matters, are agreed that this is going to happen. Ms Helen Liddell, for example, would not be giving up her Airdrie seat and going out to govern New South Wales unless it was. But where is the relevant instrument?

I have been referred, at various times, to the Parliamentary Labour Party; the Government Whips; the Electoral Commission; the Scottish Office; and the Boundary Commission for Scotland. One of these bodies will unfailingly refer me to another, which will suggest an approach to another one again. Often the process is circular, so that an initial approach to, say, the Electoral Commission will end with a recommendation from somebody else that the members of the commission are the people who know about these things. It is worse than dealing with British Energy, or whatever it is that the Gas Board now calls itself.

The difference between 330 and 324 may prove crucial in May, or whenever the election takes place. A week ago there was a story that Mr Tony Blair was contemplating a snap election in February. There is nothing better for a paper on a slack Saturday than a snap election. It then turned out that, though the information was genuine, in the sense that it had been duly received, it had been the wrong information. It had been intended to deceive: in particular, to deceive Mr Michael Howard and Mr Charles Kennedy.

It is, by the way, a constitutional myth that the Prime Minister has the sole right to decide the date of the election. Certainly the Queen cannot dissolve Parliament off her own bat. Nor can she properly refuse the request of a Prime Minister for a dissolution. But the members of the Cabinet can make their views known to the Prime Minister beforehand, whether individually or collectively. The present Cabinet are, with the obvious exception of Mr Gordon Brown, such a collection of timid placemen and placewomen that they would hardly dare to look for a mouse under the Downing Street sofa, still less to question Mr Blair's judgement on the timing of an election.

Though I am not exactly challenging the collective wisdom of Westminster that the election will be held in May, I think it more likely that Mr Blair will go late than that he will go early. After all, Alec Douglas-Home went the full term in 1964 and the bet very nearly came off when Harold Wilson failed to obtain the large majority that most people had expected. James Callaghan in 1979 and John Major in 1997 are not, admittedly, happy precedents, though the latter turned out to be justified in hanging on in 1992. But it is at least arguable that Wilson in 1970 and Edward Heath in February 1974 were both defeated unexpectedly partly because they had both cut short a parliament which had another year to run.

By several accounts, Mr Blair seems less confident than several of his colleagues and the bulk of the press (notably Mr Rupert Murdoch's papers) that the election is as good as won. This is mainly because of the war in Iraq. The Prime Minister is reposing his hopes in the January elections in that unhappy country. But even if they take place successfully, which is doubtful, they will not on that account bring the fighting to an end. We appear to be entering an era of perpetual warfare - or rather of perpetual, even if sporadic, killing - such as George Orwell would have recognised.

It was perhaps significant that the two top gongs in The Spectator's parliamentary awards, which were dished out last week, went to two opponents of the war, one Conservative, the other Liberal Democrat, Sir Peter Tapsell and Mr Kennedy. It is, you might think, not at all surprising that a panel of judges consisting of reasonably well-heeled metropolitan journalists should have made such a choice (which is not, of course, reflected in the editorial policy of the paper concerned).

But what is interesting about the Iraq war is that it is not an issue which arouses only liberal and middle-class opinion. This is so despite the Daily Mirror's drop in circulation after it opposed the adventure. It is one factor, among others, which distinguishes Iraq now from Suez in 1956. Mr Kennedy is not regarded as unpatriotic, as the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell was on that earlier occasion. And one cannot imagine the families of British troops 48 years ago responding to death as the families of the Black Watch did last week. They would have responded with whatever is the Scottish equivalent of the stiff upper lip. They would certainly not have forced a wreath into No 10, the gesture being rendered all the more poignant by its coincidence with Remembrance Day.

The moral is that, in Scotland or anywhere else, the working classes can no longer be taken for granted by Labour. We have known this for a long time, at least since 1979. But then they moved to Margaret Thatcher. Today the underestimated Mr Kennedy may be the beneficiary. If I were Charlie, I would get out a poster saying: "Don't vote for George Bush/Or Rupert Murdoch/Vote LibDem/The party that believes in Britain." Or something like that, anyway.