Whatever Happened to By Election Reporting?

I can't remember reading much about the Crewe & Nantwich by-election in the papers this week beyond the general view that a Conservative victory is a foregone conclusion (not a view I share, incidentally). So I was interested to read this in Charles Moore's Spectator diary, as it really chimed with me...

It would be nice if the interest in electoral contests, renewed by last week’s events, would revive the reporting of by-elections. By-election campaigns were well reported by newspapers in the past. They would send star journalists to the constituency for two or three weeks before polling. Their dispatches were a readable way of interleaving national concerns with local issues, which is how voters think about things. They taught the reader a great deal about the texture of the nation. In recent years, these reports have died away, partly because, thanks to better medicine, there are far fewer by-elections than in the past, and partly because the results had become much more predictable than in the days of the great upsets of the Sixties and Seventies. Two by-elections are now pending. One result — in Boris Johnson’s Henley — is almost a foregone conclusion, but the other, and more imminent — in the late Gwyneth Dunwoody’s Crewe and Nantwich — will be exciting. Please let us read the story as it unfolds.

Come back Vincent Hanna!

UPDATE: As if on cue Jonathan Isaby has a series of reports from Crewe on THREE LINE WHIP.