A PLAY about how the current coalition government was formed aired on March 28 on Channel 4.

Given that the general election on May 7 is thought quite likely also to end up in some form of coalition, the play — written by James Graham — made interesting viewing.

It’s too soon for historians to form a judgement on the impact of the last five years of government — not least because it will be several decades yet before a range of official papers is available.

Recent years have seen a range of measures around data protection and freedom of information that have provided some kind of framework on how information is held about people, what is held and how people can access this.

Yet very little is ever likely to be officially known about the five days of discussions in May 2010 that led to the Tory-Lib Dem coalition.

Graham has stated in a London Evening Standard article that “what happened in those rooms was not recorded. No minutes were taken. The civil servants were sent out of the room.”

He added: “If we ever want a truly accurate record of what happened, it’s not the official archive that will do it, we’ll need to be rounding up BlackBerries.”

Historians rely on archives for much primary research, but of course they are not the only source. Participants in the 2010 talks have written accounts of them and some have clearly also talked to Graham as he was writing the play.

Official records are usually a note of key points and decisions rather than blow-by-blow accounts, but even so their absence removes an important part of the research framework for a modern political historian seeking to establish the realities of political power in early 21st-century Britain.

The disdain for keeping official records has been underlined since by stories that government figures such as former education minister Michael Gove used private email addresses for official exchanges precisely to avoid these being captured as part of the record.

Of course, one can overplay the importance of this. In the days before email that same exchange might have been held face-to-face (with no witnesses) or perhaps over the telephone where it was possibly less likely to be captured.

One might ask why governments ever kept records. It was certainly not so that future generations of socialist historians could find out what they had been up to.

The answer is that the ruling class relies not just on the memory of individual figures but on a bureaucratic structure that keeps records of events and decisions. For example, if the issue of a coalition does arise again in May, civil servants should be able to check back for the framework of how this was done in 2010.

The experience of 2010 does suggest that for the purposes of historical research and so that our successors can find out what went on in government, there does need to be some further measure to ensure appropriate records are kept.

Perhaps there needs to be an official government history department, overseen by MPs and specifically charged with making sure that a proper record is kept of all meetings and events.

It sounds tedious, but aside from its historical value it is also about democratic transparency and accountability. In an open society the process of government should not be going on behind closed doors.