It is a lexicon of vernacular stone-faced and brick-clad approximations of bits of olde England. Miniature castles and overgrown cottages all arranged in a great dentated cul-de-sac.

It could only be called a village by an estate agent — actually it’s a strap-on to the outskirts of Dorchester.

It falls in the constituency of Dorset West, one of the tightest marginals in this election. As something depressingly new masquerading as something comfortingly old, it’s an ideal memorial for its local MP, Oliver Letwin, the shadow chancellor.

Libdemwin is as close as the Tories have got to arranging an acceptable face. He is the soft and smiley personal instructor for Yakult Conservatism. He is the only shadow cabinet member who, if you saw him standing outside an infant school, wouldn’t make you instinctively warn the headmistress.

They whisper that his brain is so large it is kept in a refrigerated room in Central Office where other members of the shadow cabinet can be plugged in like so many iPods in need of a random shuffle. Personally, I think he should be the next Doctor Who.

Sadly, on the day I managed to get down to West-Dorset-twinned-with-the-past, Libdemwin is nowhere to be found. He went missing in the last election, forced to go on the run like the Incredible Hulk until he could prove his innocence. This time whatever it is he’s fleeing, it’s self-inflicted.

So I go off and have lunch with Billy Bragg, the socialist troubadour, who lives in a converted B&B on top of a cliff full of fossils, which in themselves could be a memorial for Bragg’s old Labour party. Bragg is encouraging his Labour neighbours to vote Lib Dem to oust the Tory. He’s good company. It’s nice to talk to an old socialist romantic who wants to eradicate Conservatives rather than emulate them.

West Dorset has more history than it knows what to do with. It’s Hardy country, of course, and is littered with obscene chalk men and lumps of Bronze Age fort that were ineffective anti- Roman speed bumps. You can barely dig your garden without finding a Roman mosaic or a Bronze Age shepherd. But Hardy’s farmers who built the stone churches and flint manor houses and whose names furrow the war memorials have all gone.

I finally track down Letwin at a public meeting in a new village hall built with lottery money. He gets out of a suitably rural four-wheel drive, slips out of his man-of-the-earth Barbour and into the rumpled suit of a man who doesn’t want to look disrespectful but then again doesn’t want to look like Jeremy Thorpe.

The meeting is preaching to the converted — most of them converted before Anthony Eden. They ask thoughtful questions with local resonance. What will he do about inheritance tax if he becomes chancellor? Smartly, Letwin says: sadly nothing. He’d love to but Gordon Brown has left such a mess that he won’t be able to afford it.

“I could promise to,” he says wistfully. “But I can’t be sure when I’d get round to it so I won’t make a promise I can’t keep. If it’s a make-or-break issue for you, then you’d better not vote for me.”

This is smart. Vomitously Jimmy Stewart, but effective.

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