Members of Parody Trapped by cliche and caricature, modern British novels fail to make the most of the complex personalities and power plays of Westminster

You would expect a British government minister - even me, the Minister for Europe - to be patriotic on all public occasions. But it is no strain for me to say that there are more and better novels being written in Britain today than anywhere else: both Jonathan Coe and Alan Hollinghurst are witness to the muscular strength of contemporary writing in England. But why am I - as a politician - disappointed in their latest novels?

Writing about politicians and politics is tricky: and these two novels have MPs as central characters. Jonathan Coe's roman- fleuve about his generation of Birmingham adolescents who left school for university just as Margaret Thatcher took office leads them through to life under Tony Blair. There are many moments of Kingsley Amis- style humour, mixed with a bleak discussion of how love, marriage, friendship and the unbearable memory of lost opportunities dominate the human condition. There is some marvellous sociological observation and lots of sharp detail, which make his novel better than any instant history.

Alan Hollinghurst rightly won the Booker Prize for the novel, which confirms him as the modern-day Anthony Powell of gay Britain. Like Coe, his tale is very British, or rather English. He writes about the next social station up from Coe - the Notting Hill set of wealthy with houses in the country and in the south of France, for whom Birmingham is just an ugly accent, not a vital British city with a strong sense of pride. Hollinghurst's Europe is that of music and gay grand tours. Despite the penetration of British life over the past 25 years by waves of foreigners - 300,000 French, 200,000 Spanish, 170,000 Germans, hundreds of thousands of Muslims from the sub-continent - the combined 950 pages of the two books can offer only one main character with a hint of the exotic: a public school and Oxford-educated son of a Lebanese millionaire whose descent via cocaine and uncontrolled indulgence into the final agonies of Aids is a horror story. But both books are, for all that, serious discussions of the condition of England, and principally London, during the past quarter century.

Had Hollinghurst published The Line of Beauty closer to the epoch it is based in - the meretricious 1980s - it would have become Britain's The Bonfire of the Vanities. Never has that extraordinary decade - when every complacent conventional wisdom was turned upside down - been so pitilessly exposed. The book sees it as a time when everything had its price, and every value that was associated with the British way of life was expelled from the moral listing equivalent of the FTSE 100. Too easy, though, to blame the process on Thatcherism. The descent of the British left into the worst banalities and excesses of 1968 leftism - a fatuous admiration for syndicalist militancy in which communists on Marxism Today gave battle to Trotskyists on Socialist Worker - swamped an intelligent response. A socialist Poujadism defined Labour's response to Europe - though this political malady has now infected even more deeply today's Conservatives.

Hollinghurst rightly does not let Labour into his novel. Instead, he takes the reader into the horror of self-indulgent politics, with a rising Thatcherite minister who is sleeping with his secretary and involved in business deals rather than working full- time in politics. There is a brilliant Oxford graduate - a promiscuous homosexual, provided by Conservative Central Office with a wife as a cover to protect his career. And everyone is seeking to make money, money, money. Other than a love of Strauss, and a certain off-hand generosity, there is no redeeming feature in his 1980 Tory minister.

I can admire the style, the insight and the energy. But - as an MP for 10 years - I am deeply frustrated by the description of politics in both books. One reason is because they so easily descend to a parody, borrowed from the press: Hollinghurst's Tory minister, for example, is hardly a type. The tabloids were as ruthless in Thatcher's time as they are now. (One day, Lord Rothermere, owner of the group that publishes the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday, may ask his journalists to devote as much time to the varying beds that newspaper bosses, editors and journalists sleep in as he does to the private life of political figures - but don't hold your breath). The David Blunkett saga - a successful working-class cabinet minister caught in the cross-fire of the rightwing press - is a reminder of the British obsession with sex: under current tabloid rules, sex is part of public, not private space. Yet most politicians work very hard, are uxorious and, whatever the administration, are slaves to their officials and red boxes and diaries. Few have energy or time to let sap rise in other areas.

Of course there are divorces and affairs in politics but nothing as exciting as the lusts and loves of BBC employees or the Football Association. Blunkett stands as the great exception to this rule: he fell head over heels in love and let his desire to be a father and lover sweep all before him. But Blunkett returns home to a terraced house in South Yorkshire. His story will be told and retold as long as the narrative of politics continues, and will be seen as proof that life always exceeds art. Which novelist would have invented such a story?

Coe's clever New Labour MP is a moral disaster zone - and a caricature. Endlessly on the hunt for headlines but without any real political soul (he, of course, leaves his wife and young children for his assistant) he incarnates every cliche about New Labourism. He writes a kind of unending London Review of Books whine on the events of Britain in the past few years - from the collapse of Rover to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. His MP has a redemptive moment at the end of the book when he resigns to go off with his new girlfriend. He sends a long letter to Tony Blair and gets a long hand-written reply. (That at least rings true: this prime minister takes much more time meeting and writing to MPs than the lobby journalist portrayal of him lets on. After Wednesday's prime minister's questions, Blair spends hours meeting delegations of Labour MPs wanting to move policy on different issues, he signs hundreds of books and bottles of whisky for constituency raffles, and he has tough sessions - some as long as cabinet meetings - with a back-bench committee of Labour MPs.)

We simply have no successful novels about contemporary politics. There is no Michael Dobbs writing high-octane books, ready-made for television. Two journalists, Andy McSmith and Simon Walters, have produced readable tales but there is no minister such as Douglas Hurd, whose recent stories based on cabinet turmoil in a Tory administration are perfect miniatures of the political- parliamentary novel. Labour has not produced a Maurice Edelman, whose now-forgotten political narratives offered a parliamentary insider's counterpoint to C.P. Snow's accounts of high life in state and university administration.

In part, this is because there are few writers in the ranks of Labour MPs and there has been only one intellectual in the cabinet since 1997. Compared with the administrations of Attlee and Wilson with its starred firsts and brilliant ex-dons and writers such as Hugh Dalton, Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Roy Jenkins and Barbara Castle, the present Labour government is better on the football premiership than Proust. There is no Labour salon. The dinner parties where ripe game was served while guests waited in a mixture of terror and awe for Thatcher to drop in - described so well by Hollinghurst - are unknown to Labour, whose ministers and MPs go home to the regions or return to No 10 and No 11 to feed small children. Labour has no Boris Johnson, no Alan Clark, no All Souls intellectual such as John Redwood, no old Etonian Notting Hill set, no Spectator - and no house newspaper such as the Daily Mail or The Daily Telegraph, which act as come-what-may cheerleaders for Conservative politics.

Yet the very serious use of power undertaken since 1997, the mammoth changes in the way Britain is governed, its international profile, its attempts to rebalance social relations in favour of more fairness, and the long run of economic success surely deserve an attempt to put all this into the form of art. There is polemical pamphleteering in the form of drama - David Hare's Stuff Happens portrays a prime minister and foreign secretary struggling with the dilemma of whether to tackle Saddam Hussein's tyranny or leave him mocking the UN and filling mass graves with his victims. But little else has been performed.

Neither Hollinghurst nor Coe are able to go beyond using their MPs as vehicles for cliches, because neither is interested in the locus of all politics in Britain - Westminster and Whitehall. In the modern world's greatest political biography, Robert Caro's books on Lyndon Johnson, the physical terrain - the Senate and its corridors and offices where Johnson built his power - is far more important than his sexual by-plays. But the terrace and tea-room, the chamber and the corridors of parliament do not exist for Hollinghurst and Coe.

It is in the Commons that all British politics focuses. A minister who cannot do it at the despatch box does not last long. It is still in the tea-room that the best political news is exchanged and opposition within Labour to controversial policies is organised. The best commentary on the fortunes of today's Conservative Party can be seen on the opposition benches. They are always empty. Top shadow ministers moonlight with directorships. There is no hunger for power. No Tory Tony Blair or Gordon Brown working 18 hours a day, year after year, repelling party militants and ditching useless policies to make their party electable.

There is one great British novelist who understood this, and even today his novels remain the best commentary on how MPs, parliament and British politics works. Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels should be required reading for any student of government and politics. Despite being more than a century old, there are no finer novels in describing and understanding how parliamentary politics works.

Which MP has not felt as Phineas Finn: "He succeeded thoroughly in making the House understand that he was very angry, - but he succeeded in nothing else. He could not catch the words to express the thoughts of his mind." Or this definition of the qualities needed to rise to the top of British politics: "The man who can be all things to all men, who has ever a kind word to speak, a pleasant joke to crack, who can forgive all sins, who is ever prepared for friend or foe but never very bitter to the latter, who forgets not men's names and is always ready with little words." Plus ca change...

And which minister in recent years falls into this category: "The most wonderful ministerial phenomenon is he who rises high in power and place by having made himself thoroughly detested and also, - alas for parliamentary cowardice! - thoroughly feared. Given sufficient audacity, a thick skin, and power to bear for a few years the evil looks and cold shoulders of his comrades, and that is the man most sure to make his way to some high seat."

For Trollope the real job in government was not in No 10 but next door - "the Exchequer where the work is hard and certain, where a man can do, or at any rate attempt to do, some special thing. A man there if he sticks to that and does not travel beyond it, need not be popular, need not be a partisan, need not be eloquent, need not be a courtier."

Contemporary parliamentary politics has no novelists or chroniclers. Go into the Members' Lobby and you see small clusters and politically obsessed men and women huddled in groups whispering secrets to each other. They are political editors and lobby journalists who have now all but given up reporting what happens in the chamber and spend more time in each others' company than talking to MPs.

A foreigner who tried to understand political coverage on TV or radio would come to understand that politics in Britain consists of political reporters interviewing political reporters about what other political reporters think. In my own area, Europe, I am amazed at the stuff I read because rarely, if ever, does any political editor or columnist bother to call with a question or to check a fact before telling readers or viewers what is going on in Whitehall or parliament on the great issue of Europe. The default setting of most journalists and especially the grandees who interview for the BBC is based on the London media establishment cynicism about Europe - the salon view grounded in the contempt for Brussels and the isolationism of the Daily Mail and The Spectator.

Faulty intelligence destroys good generalship. If my opponents believe what the press tells them about what I and fellow ministers and Labour MPs are up to, so much the better - as I read very little that corresponds to what I think (and sometimes know) is going on. But I am still waiting for the first serious important novel about this administration with its commitment to permanent reformism, and its ministers and MPs who, while they do not match the fruity extravagances of their Tory opposite numbers, remain complex and interesting public personalities. Or perhaps the secret of New Labour's longevity in power is that no one thinks we are interesting and exotic enough to write a real book about.