For the time being, the former political class remains in charge. It has as much legitimacy as the ancien regime in pre-revolutionary France, with the same moral bankruptcy, calculating venality and profound sense of entitlement. This elite has the same distaste for democracy as 18th-century lords, and over the long term the same chances of survival. In its dying convulsions, Jean-Claude Juncker’s political class has abolished democracy. Italy has had three consecutive unelected prime ministers since Silvio Berlusconi’s scepticism about the euro caused the EU elite to recruit an unscrupulous cabal of bankers to remove him (former US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner gives a gripping account of this unwholesome manoeuvre in his recent memoir).