Politicians lie. As statements of the obvious go, for most people that one ranks alongside the pope’s Catholicity and the toilet habits of bears. Never mind that many MPs are perfectly straightforward, or at least no more prone than the rest of us to fibbing their way out of a tight corner. For millions, the default response to anything any politician says is, “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?’’, as the Times correspondent Louis Heren once put it.

So Adam Macqueen’s book, a compendium of great political whoppers past and present, is sure to find an eager audience. All the old favourites are here, from the Profumo affair to Jonathan Aitken impaling himself on his “simple sword of truth”, right through to the bare-faced fibs of this spring’s Brexit campaign, alongside a few unedifying episodes that might more accurately be described as overenthusiastic spin, catastrophic failures of understanding or promises on which ministers couldn’t deliver. Like a sort of giant supermarket sweep through the dodgier aisles of Westminster, in which the author dashes round collecting up all the best reasons never to trust the establishment again, it’s lively enough entertainment.

But that’s all it is, because this is basically a glorified loo book. It consists almost entirely of fairly well-worn stories, seemingly rehashed entirely from cuttings rather than informed by original research, which the author has done little more than group by theme and bookend with brief essays. It’s perfect for casually dipping in and out of, since they’re still riveting tales, and occasionally Macqueen does bring out something more contemporary in them – for example, by focusing not on the section of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech everyone knows, but on a dubious story he told about the last white woman supposedly living on the street where all the other white families had moved out. Such deliberately vague, apocryphal stories are all too prevalent today (remember Nigel Farage’s train journey from London to Kent on which he supposedly didn’t hear a word of English?) and the parallels are striking, if not particularly fleshed out. He is right, too, to note the grim irony that mistrust of mainstream politicians is driving voters into the arms of crackpots and conspiracy theorists who are even more hopelessly detached from the truth.

But most of these scandals are so well known that there’s nothing new to say about them. What makes the cursory final chapter on how to stop politicians lying so unsatisfactory, meanwhile, is that the author barely bothers to construct an argument about why they do so in the first place.

The deeper motives we all have for lying, the extent to which the media enable or even encourage it, the pressures under which politicians operate and the crucial question of how voters respond when they’re actually told hard truths (such as that their taxes need to go up, or that they can’t have their Brexit cake and eat it), are all skimmed over in the briefest of fashions. It reads, to be blunt, as if it was assembled to meet a raging demand for stories about how awful politicians are, ho ho.

But the idea of lying politicians isn’t a joke now that Donald Trump is in the White House. It’s either a subject for really biting satire or for serious examination and the trouble is that this book falls somewhere between the two. Yes, politicians lie. But on its own, that observation is no longer enough.

• The Lies of the Land: A Brief History of Political Dishonesty by Adam Macqueen is published by Atlantic (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99