As a staffer for a member of parliament, how do you organise a parliamentary office or write a speech to be delivered in the chamber? Who do you call when you are flying solo and have managed to lose 50 constituents somewhere between Westminster Hall and the tea room? How to respond when the local press phone up to report that your boss has turned up to open a children’s fete with the school’s lollipop lady wrapped around the front bumper?

Robert Dale has attempted to answer these questions – or at least questions quite like them – and more in his book, How to Be a Parliamentary Researcher. With a respectful nod to Paul Flynn’s How to Be a Backbencher and Gerald Kaufman’s How to Be a Minister, Dale tackles the contribution of the humble bag-carrier, and the key role we play in our nation’s democratic narrative.

The author has an obvious and refreshing enthusiasm for his subject, of the sort that I can faintly recall having back in the dim and distant past, which makes his text a pleasure to read. More than that, and just as important to any newly employed, fresh-faced researcher, it is understandable. Too many staffers, inexperienced in the job, draw a blank looking up the running order of the Queen’s speech in Erskine May, end up Googling ‘what is Black Rod’ in desperation, and are left with a world of woe logged in their search history. Without dumbing down how parliament works, Dale manages to make his explanations accessible, which makes this a book for researchers and students of politics alike.

However, it is primarily a book for researchers, and people who want to become researchers, focusing for the most part on how to get a foot on the political ladder by nailing a CV and covering letter, the best way to organise a parliamentary office or tour, and how to support an MP in his or her role. The section on how to get employed in the first place is well worth a read. Parliament is trying to break out of the cycle of privilege, offering real opportunities via paid placements for those who would not otherwise have the connections or means to work for free for a couple of months. Increasingly, not being related to a leading light in your party is not an active disadvantage. Starting a covering letter for a job in, say, the prime minister’s office, with the words, ‘Dear Cameron MP’ (it happens) is. Don’t do it, kids.

There is a party political element to the book, in a chapter on engaging and campaigning, which will prove useful to those who tend to find the weather cold but the reception warm on the hashtag-doorstep. As Dale notes, the role of the researcher has changed in recent years, and many staffers do spend at least part of the weekend battling the elements with the boss.

My one major criticism? The blurb claims that researchers are ‘branded bag-carriers’, as if the term is pejorative. On the contrary, bag-carrying is an honourable profession, undertaken by dedicated footsoldiers, and for whom How to Be a Parliamentary Researcher is likely to provide a useful resource.

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Sadie Smith is a former parliamentary researcher and is now media officer for the speaker of the House of Commons, who wrote the introduction to the book

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How to Be a Parliamentary Researcher

Robert Dale

BiteBack Publishing | 288pp | £12.99