Bookends | 1 October 2011

Political sketchwriting, like most humorous writing, is one of those things that looks easy, especially to people who would never be able to do it in a trillion years.

At any one time, though, there are only a couple of sketchwriters who are any good at all, and some of us find we move papers in order to read them. I realise now I must have been a very strange teenager to turn to Frank Johnson first every morning, and now I am an even stranger man in middle age reading Simon Hoggart every morning.

Send Up The Clowns (Guardian Books, £8.99) is a selection of his sketches since 2007, beginning with the long, agonising changeover from Blair to Brown: hard now to read about without a large glass of red wine to hand. But Hoggart has comic timing, a light touch and the good sense only to include pieces that show he was right all along.