With the Labour party reduced to a cult in honour of the vain and incompetent Jeremy Corbyn, the Tory party is currently ruling the roost. Perhaps the Old Oligarch, a fifth-century BC Athenian hostile to democracy — we do not know his real name — can help out.

The Old Oligarch’s fascinating pamphlet took the view that dêmokratia — Athens’ radical, citizen-centred direct democracy — was fine if you were poor, ignorant and worthless, but what sensible person would want to live in a city controlled by such people? Only the ‘best people’, he argued, ‘who are disciplined, obedient to the...