By Bagehot

MY PRINT column this week looks at a huge shake-up of Britain’s parliamentary map that is currently underway, and the degree to which this boundary review is causing what one senior Tory describes as “stress and angst” among MPs at Westminster. The accusation from the Labour Party is that horrid partisan motives lie behind the boundary review, which will take the House of Commons from 650 to 600 members and redraw hundreds of seats so that they contain almost identical numbers of electors (a big change from the status quo, in which lots of Welsh or Scottish seats contain as few as 50,000 voters, while several English seats contain 75,000 or more).