BEN MACINTYRE has reported for The Times on three American and four British elections, but he has never been so frustrated as he has been in Britain in 2005. Tuesday was a typical day. He was trying to catch up with Clare Short in her Birmingham Ladywood constituency. But he couldn’t find the former International Development Secretary, who resigned over the Iraq war.

As he reported, Ms Short has suddenly become so invisible that some suggest that she may never have existed at all. She was certainly campaigning, Macintyre was told, but she wasn’t “doing any press” and did not want to co-operate. Her reluctance to meet the national press is understandable — she would undoubtedly be questioned about why she took so much longer to resign than did Robin Cook.

But it isn’t only Clare Short who doesn’t want national newspaper reporters joining her on the stump. News editors confirm that both main parties, but particularly Labour, are deliberately obstructing attempts by reporters to follow candidates out on the stump.

The trend has been evident for two decades, but a British general election has never been so obviously stage-managed for television. Newspapers get a look in at the morning press conferences and the party leaders co-operate with interviews. But out on the campaign trail reporters aren’t welcome and neither Blair nor Howard has a campaign bus for reporters. Both prefer to meet carefully selected loyalists who won’t ask awkward questions, and the leaders no longer speak to the evening mass rallies that used to be a major feature of elections. Elections aren’t so much fun any more.

Is it any wonder that The Sun, which enjoys elections, asked this week whether this was the most boring election ever? Is it any wonder that in the first week of the campaign, when the parties launched their manifestos, the election got less than half the amount of front-page space in the red-tops as in 2001, according to research at Loughborough University reported in The Guardian. The lack of interest was more pronounced in the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, where less than a quarter as much front page space was devoted to politics.

With so many marginal seats being contested, it might have been expected that the parties would court the regional dailies and the local weeklies, many of which are read and savoured and respected and trusted in nearly every household in their localities. That, indeed, was what the Labour Party told regional editors only last year.

But it hasn’t happened, says Terry Manners, Editor of the Western Daily Press in Bristol; regional newspapers are lucky if they get five minutes on a bus or a train with party bigwigs. The Eastern Daily Press in Norwich has been offered interviews on the London-Norwich train from Diss and in the back of a car to Yarmouth.

One problem seems to be that the parties keep to their national agenda even when addressing the regional papers, says Doug Pickford, Editor of the Cheadle Post and Times, which circulates in Britain’s most marginal constituency, Cheadle, where the Lib Dems have a majority of 33. National politicians could make much more use of his paper if they brought up local issues. Instead, they tended to recite national soundbites, he says.

Barrie Williams, Editor of the Western Morning News in Plymouth, agrees. One massive issue for the South West that is not being addressed, he says, is bovine TB, a disaster of almost foot-and-mouth proportions with the Government refusing to cull badgers. However, he has succeeded in getting answers to ten West Country questions from the three party leaders.

Another tight marginal is Norfolk North, with a Lib Dem majority of 483. Election news for most of the weeklies owned by Archant is recycled from its flagship daily, the Eastern Daily Press. But it has made a special effort for Norfolk North and published an extra page a week in which the four main candidates give detailed replies to readers’ questions, last week on affordable housing and shoreline development.

However, Terry Redhead, group editor of Archant’s Norfolk weeklies, wonders whether it is really the duty of local weeklies to beat up news about the election, especially when there is so much of it in national newspapers and on television, the radio and online news sites. Isn’t their real job to concentrate on their traditional role of reporting the WI and who’s been hatched, matched and despatched? It is, of course, but the only media outlet where voters will get any detailed information about their candidates will still be their weekly paper.

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