Sometimes it’s difficult to work out who to hate more: unelected bureaucrats who wield power, or politicians who seek power by standing for election. This might be, in part, because the relationship between the two has become seriously dysfunctional.

Paul Tucker, who until 2013 was deputy governor of the Bank of England, recently argued as much in a book called Unelected Power, which lays out the many and varied ways in which elected politicians have outsourced more and more of their power to unelected technocrats. Given that Mr Tucker has held one of the most illustrious unelected posts in the land (though he was scotched to the governor’s chair by Mark Carney), one might think he would be best advised to keep quiet about this trend. Instead, his book describes the growth of the unaccountable technocracy now under attack by populist movements.

We have long been familiar with this debate in Britain regarding quangos and faceless public service administrators. But only with Brexit did it become a mainstream issue that went beyond our borders. Zoom out further and you see it underlying populist movements all over the democratic world.