This is, of course, something Oborne could have known from the comments on his own pieces, had he condescended to read them. What is more, they have been telling him that for years.

To discover this "startling truth" for himself, though, Oborne finds it necessary to interview Caroline Lucas, George Galloway and Nigel Farage, three of what he calls "insurgent" politicians, two of whom are elected MPs (guess which one isn't).  And so the Great Man can "own" the issue.  He, and he alone, the Great Oborne, has "discovered" it.

It is Dominic Sandbrook in the Daily Wail, however, who takes a longer view, picking up on a book by Ferdinand Mount called "The New Few Or A Very British Oligarchy".


With the headline, "Bankers drowning in money. Out of touch politicians. Unaccountable quangocrats. Not for generations have those who run Britain been so far removed from the common man", we are told that this was supposed to be the era when democracy came into its own.

Instead, Mount tells us, power and wealth in Britain have slowly been consolidated the hands of a small elite, while the rest of the country struggles financially and switches off politically. 

And so it goes on – you can read the blurb from the Amazon site, whence you will learn – no doubt to your complete surprise – that we "are now ruled by a gang of fat-cats with fingers in every pie who squabble for power among themselves while growing richer".

So says Mount: "Bored with watching corrupt politicians jockeying for power, ordinary Britons are feeling disconnected from politics and increasingly cynical about the back-scratching relationship between politicians and big business".

We are sooo lucky though. In addition to all this, Mount "sets out some of the ways in which we can restore our democracy, bringing back real accountability to British business and fairness to our society". But we are not allowed to know such things without buying the book. And this is something I feel disinclined to do. The man probably has very little to offer, and I'm not risking good money to find out what it is.

The reason for the reluctance is that Mount writes of how we can "restore" democracy. The truth is that we have never really had democracy in this country. It has always been a "direction of travel", an aspiration – sometimes vague, other times more concrete. And as long as people had an appreciation that we were travelling in the right direction, revolutionary pressures were contained.

To pursue the Mount thesis, though – the sermon of the Mount, so to speak – we are taken back to Sir Robert Walpole, "an immensely talented statesman, to be sure, but also one of the most corrupt politicians this country has ever produced".

This was the man who governed Britain from 1721 to 1742. Then, says Mount, the gilded elite maintained tight control over the levers of patronage. Under the oligarchic system nicknamed "Old Corruption", a handful of Whig families and their fawning hangers-on jealously hoarded jobs and influence.

You can see why this is attractive – making the parallel with the "gilded elite", then and now. But to find an answer to our current problems, we should not be going back so far. We need to look at more recent times.

That "gilded elite", of which Mount complains,  was just as much a feature of British society during the 1920s and '30s. Where we now have the "Notting Hill Set", we then had the Cliveden Set. And, indicative of the political tensions that dominated the early '40s were the frequent references in newspapers and books to vested interests and the "old gang".

Socialism them was supposed to be the great cure, and it was for socialism that the people voted in the general election of July 1945, rather than party. The move away from party had been well charted since 1942, when a local journalist, George Reakes, won a by-election in suburban Wallasey, trouncing the Tories, whose vote fell some 35 percent. He was one of four independents to win a seat that year.

But, by 1945, voters were moving back to the party fold, voting for Labour in 1945, as the giver of socialism. But instead of a "New Jerusalem", voters got the Union bosses running the government. One "old gang" had been replaced by another, opening the way for Churchill's election victory in 1951.

We nevertheless continued to see "see-saw" politics, amid  the rise and rise of union power. By the time the Unions were more or less sorted out by Maggie,we were in another union – the nascent European Union. Perversely, it was seen at the time we joined as the antidote to the trades unions.

Somewhere along the line, the movement towards democracy came to a grinding halt. It has since has gone progressively into reverse, to bring us to where we are today. But it is a grave mistake to believe that we have ever had democracy. We haven't. That is at the heart of the problem

And that is what the Old Swan Manifesto is about – reversing the flow and putting us back on the path to democracy. So far, the meeting is vastly over-subscribed. Far too many people have applied to be able to answer all the e-mails, so we are of a view that this meeting will have to be the first of many.

I will keep people informed of developments via this website, and there will be more on the Old Swan in the next week. Here, though, you need not expect sermons.

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