Whenever Simon Hoggart writes about Michael Fabricant, he makes note of the honorable gentleman from Lichfield’s hair. “How many My Little Ponies, we asked, were slaughtered to make such a creation?” reads one of his countless dispatches. That 2003 piece, in fact, was devoted entirely to Fabricant’s mane (or lack of it) and its uncanny ability to change color, size, shape, and length. The previous day, Hoggart had noticed that Fabricant’s blond toupée “used to be roughly normal length, finishing round the level of his ear lobes.” Yet twenty-four hours later, “the thing had reached his shoulders, a great lustrous cascade of tresses curling over and even caressing the collar of his jacket.”

It’s hard to imagine a congressional reporter for a major American newspaper writing such things about a member of Congress. But Hoggart is not an impetuous blogger; he’s a parliamentary sketch writer for The Guardian, the paper of Britain’s right-thinking liberals. His kind has existed for centuries, dating back to Samuel Johnson, one of England’s greatest literary figures (born, as it happens, in Lichfield). The eighteenth-century poet, essayist, lexicographer, and biographer began filing parliamentary reports in the 1740s, and often had to use his imagination to describe how elected officials conducted the people’s business—journalists were banned from attending parliamentary debates at the time, and so Johnson had to piece together his reports using bits of information gathered from witnesses. Or he just made things up. Many of the speeches today attributed to William Pitt (the Younger) were actually written by Johnson, who simply printed what he imagined Pitt had said.

Today, sketch writers don’t need to make anything up partly because they are allowed to watch parliamentary proceedings, but also because they have such great material. Sketch writers differ from typical legislative correspondents in...

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