You may or may not remember Michael Rimmer. Tall chap, rather stilted. Served as our last Prime Minister before becoming the first president of Great Britain.

No? Well, maybe that’s because he was fictional – but that shouldn’t make him any less respected in the pantheon of former Prime Ministers.

Played by Peter Cook in the British cinematic oddity from 1970, “The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer”, the central character is a scheming, manipulative politician who achieves ultimate success by at first appearing to give the general public a direct say over every government policy, then reaps the rewards when they get sick of constant referendums.

The idea of “direct democracy”, as it’s optimistically called, is a bit of a fetish among certain progressive types. Why wait every five years before electing individuals who have to represent and balance the opinions of 75,000 constituents when new technology would allow us all, every one of us, to have our opinion on every issue instantly and accurately recorded? Surely the notion of Burkean representative democracy is old hat, as relevant today as VHS tapes? Or Eurovision?