The last called-off Games were those of 1940 (slated first for Tokyo and then for Helsinki) and 1944 (notionally awarded to London). When peace returned, the world was in ruins. It’s hard to imagine today the ubiquitous desolation and destitution — although perhaps that will soon become easier.

London, still scarred by the Blitz, agreed to host the first post-war Summer Olympics in 1948. Some Britons decried the waste of resources. Yet the Austerity Olympics, as they came to be known, were a triumph. There was no grandiosity, no razzmatazz; no money. Two weeks before the Games began, the main stadium, Wembley, was still being used for greyhound racing; only then was the track hastily replaced with cinders.

There was no athletes’ village — in contrast to the lavish accommodation in Berlin in 1936. Instead, participants were crammed into a scattered assortment of barracks, hostels and schools. Rationing was still in force (although the daily allowance for athletes was higher); the gold medals were made of oxidised silver; the total budget for the Games was £730,000.

Yet the make-do-and-mend approach somehow emphasised what really mattered about the Games. “It was a liberation of the spirit to be there in London,” said Emil Zátopek, the Czechoslovak army officer whose dramatic exploits in the 10,000m and 5,000m made him a household name among British sports fans. “After those dark days of the war, the bombing, the killing and the starvation, the revival of the Olympics was as if the sun had come out. Suddenly, there were no frontiers, no more barriers, just people meeting together.”

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Bring on the People's Peers

By Richard Askwith

Like many middle-aged running enthusiasts, I think of Zátopek as a kind of patron saint of our sport: a man who embodied all the virtues of the long-distance runner, from demented dedication to grace in victory and defeat. I first heard his voice more than 30 years ago, in a documentary about the 1948 Games in which he spoke of his joy at being part of that Olympic rebirth in London.

He reminisced amusingly about his dawn journey, by public transport and on foot, from a barracks in Uxbridge to the school in Northwood where his future wife, the javelin-thrower Dana Ingrová, was staying. The anecdote culminated with one of his medals being dropped in a swimming-pool, and a semi-naked Zátopek being chased away by an enraged headmistress. Nothing was said about medals or times: the memories he cherished were to do with romance and adventure.

Later, I learnt more about this remarkable man: his mind-boggling training routines; his humour and kindness; his courage when the Prague Spring was crushed. Later still, writing his biography, I came across such additional details as the fact that, in 1948, his Communist minders barred him from attending the Olympic opening ceremony. It was a scorching hot day and he had a big race the next day: why jeopardise his chances by parading in the sun?

Zátopek protested: “People at home will ask me what the Olympics were like, and I will have to tell them that I don’t know, because I was sitting in the shade.” The minders insisted. So Zátopek, a self-taught polyglot, persuaded the Danish team to let him enter the stadium with them, before shuffling forward (since the nations were ordered alphabetically) to join his fellow Czechoslovaks. Some athletes wept as they marched around the track, overwhelmed by this final proof that the six-year nightmare of war was over. Had Zátopek’s priorities been more ruthlessly focused (in the modern way) on competitive advantage, he would never have shared that experience.

Four years later, Helsinki hosted the Games. Finland had recovered well, but the world’s wounds had festered. The Soviet Union insisted on a separate athletes’ village for the nations of the Communist bloc. Barbed wire and armed guards defended the special compound at Otaniemi from Western intrusion. Fraternisation was strictly forbidden.

Luckily for humanity, some athletes had better ideas – as young people often do. Soviet and US shot-putters were soon striking up cheerful friendships. So were the distance-runners of many nations. Australia’s Les Perry dodged his way into Otaniemi and sought out Zátopek, who invited him to train with him and insisted that he stay to dinner. Other Westerners followed, including the Australian trainer Percy Cerutty, who spent so long quizzing Zátopek about his training methods that the gates were locked for the night before he could leave. Zátopek gave him his bed and spent the night on a friend’s floor. Distance-running’s “class of ’52” (Perry, Zátopek, Mimoun, Reiff, Schade, Pirie, Chataway) remained in friendly contact for decades afterwards.

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Does any of this have anything to do with sport? Perhaps not much. Yet it matters.

In sporting terms, the 1952 Olympics are remembered primarily for Zátopek’s unique distance-running treble: 5,000m, 10,000m and marathon. But their most important gift to the world was the renewed sense they engendered of a worldwide Olympic “family”. By the time Zátopek claimed his place in history by winning the marathon (his third gold, and his first attempt at the distance), his charm and friendliness had already won him the hearts of most people watching.

Rivals from his previous two events – French, Belgian, English – cheered him from the roadside as he approached the stadium. When he entered it and ran his final lap of the last event of the Games, the crowd chanted his name in deafening unison. “At that moment,” said future International Olympic Committee chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was among the spectators, “I understood what the Olympic spirit means.”

Perhaps such pieties seem quaint. By the time Covid-19 has finished with us, their value may be more obvious.

That age of relative Olympic innocence was short-lived. In 1956, in Melbourne, the German businessman Horst Dassler spent the Games quietly handing out Adidas footwear to favoured athletes. In the decades that followed, the virus of money spread. So, slowly, did the virus of unequal kit.

Today we take all that for granted. You cannot expect to be an Olympic champion without marginal advantages: better shoes, better equipment, better nutrition, better scientific and medical back-up, better management, better sponsors and funding. Everyone knows that. What we easily forget is that, when our grandparents were sports fans, most Olympic events were largely a simple contest between human and human.

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Coronavirus will change nothing

By Ben Gummer

I love the Olympics. I can retrieve my sporting memories from Games gone by as effortlessly as a poetry professor reaches for quotations. 1968? Bob Beamon, David Hemery, Kip Keino. 1972? Jim Ryun falling and losing, Lasse Virén falling and winning. 1976? Virén’s second distance-running double; disappointment for Brendan Foster and David Bedford; Comăneci, Juantorena. 1980? Coe, Ovett, Yifter, Thompson, Wells. 1984? Coe, Thompson, Sanderson, Whitbread, Moses, Decker-and-Budd. The list goes on. I watched them all, if necessary in the middle of the night.

I was also aware, even in my youth, of a darker chronology: the massacre of Israeli athletes in 1972; the grotesque injustices that provoked and succeeded the podium protests of Smith, Carlos, Norman and Čáslavská in 1968; the political boycotts (and their causes) in 1976, 1980 and 1984.

But I barely noticed another, insidious narrative. In 1968, anabolic steroids were banned. The still-unfinished war between those wishing to gain from performance-enhancing drugs and those wishing to prohibit them had begun. By 1988 (Ben Johnson), chemical assistance was endemic. There’s been a crackdown since, yet some say that 1988’s men’s 100m final in Seoul (in which only one of the first five finishers never tested positive for drugs) has been eclipsed by the women’s 1,500m final at London 2012 as the “dirtiest race in history”.

Meanwhile, money from television and sponsors has swollen the Olympic movement into a grotesquely wealthy, frequently corrupt sector of the entertainment industry, whose priorities could hardly be clearer: to the winner, oodles of glory and cash; to the also-rans, a lifetime of regret.

And today? Artificial assistance continues, but it’s mostly within the rules. That’s why, except when the Games are actually taking place, it’s hard to make sense of Olympic sport’s daily dramas without a decent grasp of such technicalities as ADRVs, TUEs and ABPs (Anti-Doping Rule Violations, Therapeutic Use Exemptions, and Athlete Biological Passports); and wash-out periods and “whereabouts” testing rules; or, beyond the laboratory: Athlete Performance Awards, sponsor hierarchies, IOC bidding processes, lottery funding, UK Athletics’ World Class Programme, Nike’s Oregon Project, World Athletics’ technical rules on carbon-fibre plates in shoes; and much, much more.

None of this would mean anything without individual human beings willing to devote years of their lives to heroic striving. But it’s easy to lose sight of them.

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By Jon Hotten

As a sport-lover, I ought to be glad to see so much money, science and expertise flowing into the Olympics. Instead, I find it harder than before to love the Olympics. London 2012 was beautiful for Britain, obviously; and I’m delighted to hear that the BBC is planning to re-broadcast some of the highlights this summer. Otherwise, however (and I can’t believe I’m alone in this) I’ve increasingly found myself impressed rather than enthralled by these quadrennial spectaculars. Yes, competitors are faster, higher, stronger, and more skilled, than ever before. But what about the sense of the Games as a gathering of the human family?

In the UK, day-by-day media coverage of recent Olympic Games has focused relentlessly on the medals table. To ask what that has to do with the Olympic spirit is to risk being called an unpatriotic killjoy — or worse. Yet perhaps, now, things will change.

If Games of the XXXII Olympiad are indeed held in Tokyo next summer, I imagine that Team GB will struggle to hoover up medals with its usual industrial efficiency. The disruption to athletes’ preparations will have been too huge. Yet imagine how we’ll feel about the fact that the Games are taking place at all. It’s a prospect that feels almost too poignant to contemplate right now, as the wilderness of broken lives around us grows vaster and more terrible. Yet one day this, too, shall pass; and, when it does, sport will have a vital role to play in helping the world to heal itself.

In his speech at the 1948 opening ceremony, the head of the London organising committee, Lord Burleigh, told athletes that they were “kindling a torch, the light from which will travel to the uttermost ends of the earth, a torch of that ageless and heartfelt prayer of mankind throughout the world, for peace and goodwill to all men”

It was all guff, of course. It still is, just as Zátopek’s much-quoted “Great is the victory but greater still is the friendship” was guff and Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s “The important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part” was guff. But sometimes, in life’s darkest chapters, guff is all you’ve got.

Look at it this way: if Covid-19 hadn’t turned the world upside down and Tokyo 2020 had started in July as planned, which kind of Olympics do you think it would have been? A not-winning-but-taking-part Olympics? Or a win-at-all-costs Olympics? And which kind of Olympics would you expect it to be in 2021?

Perhaps I’m being naïve, but I can’t help suspecting that, next summer, the Olympic movement may find itself remembering something of its true spirit. There will be fewer record-breaking performances, but there will be more gratitude, more joy, more friendship; more sense that, after a long darkness, the sun has come out.

That will be small recompense for the tragedy of Covid-19. Yet it will, even so, be something to be grateful for.

Richard’s biography of Emil Zátopek, Today We Die A Little, was published in 2016 by Yellow Jersey.

There’s an assembly on democratic reform in Germany, an assembly in Glasgow and Edinburgh on “Scotland’s future direction”, an Irish assembly on gender equality. At a local level, we’ve had assemblies on congestion in Cambridge, on air quality in Kingston, on town centres in Dudley. There have been big assemblies on constitutional change in Iceland and Mongolia, assemblies on air quality and flood mitigation in Poland, assemblies on waste management in Australia. In Belgium, there is a whole party, Agora, whose only policy is to get a permanent Citizens’ Assembly incorporated into national politics.

Since 2016, when an assembly in Ireland opened the way to a resolution of the nation’s long-running quarrel on abortion, the idea has moved rapidly into the mainstream. And now, hot on the heels of a Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat in France, a panel of ordinary British citizens is convening in Birmingham for the UK Parliament Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change.

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By Roslyn Fuller

It’s easy to understand the enthusiasm. Millions of voters have lost faith in the political classes who represent them, scorning them as a scheming elite who are in it only for themselves. Parliament’s authority has declined accordingly. Yet the behaviour of those same disillusioned voters has done little to inspire confidence in more directly democratic alternatives. Instead, thanks to social media, we listen daily to their clamour, loudly insisting that their voice be both heard and obeyed, yet scorning such niceties as examining evidence, mastering detail, considering alternative viewpoints or entertaining the possibility that they might be wrong.

In this tempestuous climate, Citizens’ Assemblies can bridge the gap between representative and direct democracy — or, if you prefer, between parliament and people. A randomly selected panel of ordinary citizens, weighted to be as representative as possible, cannot be dismissed as elite. It’s the down-to-earth “us”, not the out-of-touch “them”.

On the other hand, an assembly with a specific brief to deliberate, discuss and consider evidence, informed by experts and given time and space to focus on the matter in hand, is unlikely to display the mood swings, malleability and shallow, ill-informed certainties of raw public opinion.

The assembly now opening in Birmingham brings together a newly emboldened British public with the most pressing issue of our time. As a result, it’s the most high-profile Citizens’ Assembly the UK has seen. (My apologies to Scots who disagree.)

Commissioned last June by six Commons Select Committees, the UK Parliament Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change has been organised by Involve, the Sortition Foundation and mySociety, with expert academic input from, among others, the UCL Constitution Unit. It has 110 members, distilled from an initial 30,000 people chosen at random from the electoral roll. Its brief is to come up with suggestions for fair ways in which the UK can meet the Government’s legally binding target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. It runs until March and reports in April.

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I ought to be delighted. These are two causes close to my heart. I’ve been orchestrating coverage of the dangers of climate change for decades, in a succession of senior editorial roles at the Observer and the Independent. Over a similar period, I’ve repeatedly argued that we need a permanent Citizens’ Assembly in parliament, to replace — or at least to supplement — the House of Lords; in 2018 I devoted a whole book, People Power, to that proposition.

More recently, I was one of many people (the others were far more authoritative figures than me) who called for a Citizens’ Assembly to drain the toxicity and dishonest populism from the Brexit “debate” and secure genuine democratic consent for a prudent way forward. Those pipe dreams came to nothing. But now we actually have a well-funded Citizens’ Assembly, addressing a major issue with the backing (up to a point) of Parliament. Perhaps, after all these years, this idea’s time has come.

Yet instead of rejoicing, I feel a strange foreboding. The exercise is obviously worthwhile, and the organisers’ credentials are impeccable. If it all works well, it will capture public imagination, change attitudes and help safeguard our futures. But what if it doesn’t?

I can barely put my finger on the reasons for my pessimism. I think I feel that, somehow, issue and format sit uncomfortably together. Citizens’ Assemblies work best with questions about what’s right and what’s wrong; questions to which there are relatively few answers. Abortion: yes or no? Brexit: hard, soft, revoke or second referendum? These are big, limited, clearly differentiated choices, which cannot be satisfactorily resolved by representative politicians because of the strength of public feeling and the stridency of demagogues and interest groups.

Delegate such choices — fully and publicly — to a Citizens’ Assembly, and the shouting stops. Self-styled champions of the people lose their mandate. The power of the people is vested in the Assembly. And — since the Assembly’s proceedings are deliberative and well-informed, it’s easy to believe that the people mean what they say (in contrast to the off-the-cuff answers usually given when public opinion is consulted).

This tends to have a healing effect. Assemblies are fallible but, like the jury system, they’re visibly fair. We may disagree with their conclusions; we don’t feel cheated by them. And that’s the whole point: not what the conclusion is, but the fact that, having been reached, it commands democratic consent.

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Bring on the People's Peers

By Richard Askwith

Could this Assembly give democratic legitimacy to painful, necessary policies that would otherwise be controversial? I hope so, but there’s a good chance that it won’t. The mandate delegated to it is minimal. The public may lose interest. Parliament may well ignore its recommendations. If so, it will have been little more than a focus group.

Its proceedings will, even so, be fascinating, especially if the deliberations result in significant shifts in opinion. But you could have said the same about the Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit that UCL’s Constitution Unit organised in 2017 — and that had zero impact on what we actually did about Brexit. Perhaps Parliament’s involvement means that the Climate Change Assembly will make slightly more noise. But enough noise to make it impossible to ignore? I’m not convinced of that.

With a bigger, simpler question (e.g. “Is this an emergency or not?”; and “How big a danger do we face?”), perhaps there might have been a greater chance of a big, simple, resounding answer to resolve a national argument. In this case, however, the big question has already been decided: zero emissions is our goal and 2050 is our deadline. The Assembly’s job is to choose tactics, not strategy; to deliberate about how we get there, not where we’re going.

This feels the wrong way round. Usually, electorates express broad preferences, then leave it to their chosen representatives, helped by highly-trained civil servants and specialists, to make them happen. The harder the problem, the more important the specialists become. We wouldn’t convene a citizens’ assembly — would we? — if an epidemic of Chinese coronavirus was out of control across the UK, or an enemy invasion was imminent. Nor, arguably, should we do so with climate change. When national survival is at stake, you call in the experts and worry about the electorate’s consent for the details later on. And what we need now is for more of our finest minds to be thrown at the problem, not for the whole question to be sub-contracted.

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Meanwhile, you don’t have to be a climate change denier to wonder if prioritising the elimination of the UK’s carbon footprint is necessarily the best way to safeguard our futures. (What about putting the same effort and resources into a drive for radical green technologies, or into a plan for survival in a much hotter world?) And you don’t have to be a paid-up member of Extinction Rebellion to wonder if 2050 is perhaps too relaxed a deadline. As a nation, we still haven’t really agreed our response to such big questions, and the Citizens’ Assembly will bring us no nearer to doing so — unless it’s such a spectacular success that it Government is finally forced to prioritise the climate emergency.

I hope that it is a spectacular success: partly because I admire those who have made it happen, but mainly because, if it isn’t, we’ll probably just carry on as before. Climate change will be marginalised, as lacking political valency; MPs will use the assembly to defend themselves against charges of inaction; the drive to give Citizens’ Assemblies a bigger role in politics will fizzle out; and all those ordinary people who bought into the idea that we all had a role to play in policy-making will conclude — rather like participants in Emmanuel Macron’s “Grand Débat” exercise this time last year — that they were really just playing at helping to determine their country’s future, while the real decisions continued to be made elsewhere.

“People Power: Remaking Parliament for the Populist Age” is published by Biteback

When my short book, People Power, was published in 2018, I was invited onto BBC2’s Daily Politics to discuss my proposal for radical House of Lords reform.

“It’s a lovely idea,” began Jo Carney, referring to my suggestion that members of Parliament’s upper chamber should be selected at random like jurors. “But it’s never going to happen, is it?”

Since all the preceding items in the programme had drastically overrun, that was pretty much the entirety of the interview. It has been rankling ever since: partly because my unmade rejoinders keep improving with time, but mainly because subsequent events have doubled and redoubled the force of my arguments.

My core points were simple: that without urgent, radical action to boost Parliament’s perceived legitimacy, the survival of representative democracy in the UK cannot be guaranteed; and that the simplest way to fix this would be a radical remaking of Parliament’s most flagrantly unrepresentative chamber.

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Can anyone seriously doubt the first point today? And, if not, does anyone have a better, more achievable suggestion than the second?

The crisis in politics is perhaps more obvious now than it was in early 2018, although it was pretty obvious then. Respect for our representatives in Westminster has collapsed. The main parties barely bother to disguise their habit of putting their own interests ahead of the nation’s. Social media and the slapdash use of referendums have created an unprecedented appetite for what could loosely be described as direct democracy.

Previously voiceless millions have been empowered to make their views known, unmediated. Increasingly, they expect to be heeded. Well-funded demagogues fan resentments for their own purposes, and MPs cannot or will not resist. “People are tired of experts,” said Michael Gove. But it’s worse than that: millions are tired of Westminster politicians too.

Can anything be done? There is a strong case for reforming the Commons and/or the voting system, but the chances of Parliament authorising such reform in the foreseeable future seem negligible. The need for Lords reform, on the other hand, is almost universally acknowledged. Its members are unelected, unaccountable to the electorate, and no more representative than the Garrick Club. Why would you not tear it up and start again? Hence my focus on the Lords in People Power.

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My proposed solution was deliberately broad in its brushstrokes. The current peers would be replaced by 400 People’s Peers, randomly conscripted and weighted to be a small, representative sample of the electorate as a whole. Service would be “compulsory, well-paid and prestigious”, perhaps even involving ermine and titles.

Those selected would sit for four-year terms, including a six-month training period. The outgoing great-and-good would have the option of paid employment as trainers or specialist advisers for their randomly selected replacements. Ideally, the chamber would continue to benefit from the ex-peers’ expertise and experience. But, having no democratic mandate to represent us, those ex-peers would not deliberate or vote on our behalf.

That was about it. The details are arbitrary: it’s a sketch, not a blue-print. Its purpose was to win support for a general principle. I accept that my proposed system isn’t perfect. What matters is that the existing system is dreadful.

Those who work in Westminster struggle to grasp this. They think the current set-up works quite well. “What about all that expertise?” they say. “The courteous, well-informed debates? The well-established conventions of back-and-forth between Lords and Commons?”

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But none of that matters if the governed don’t accept the chamber’s legitimacy. If its influence can be dismissed – as it can – as the meddling of “unelected peers”, its collective wisdom counts for nothing. If you really believe that Parliament as currently configured is functioning well, you need to get out more.

If we did decide to replace the House of Lords with a chamber based on ‘sortition’ (that is, the selection of representatives by lot), there would be no shortage of experts capable of fine-tuning the system to make it viable. Groups currently working to give sortition a bigger role in UK politics include – to choose just a few – the Sortition Foundation, Unlock Democracy, Constitutional Reform, A Citizens’ House in Parliament, Compass, All Hands on Doc.

Globally, the sortition movement is vast. Wise and knowledgeable authors whose writings on the subject I recommend include: JKB Sutherland, Nicholas Gruen, Brett Hennig and Anthony Barnett (who made a proposal much like mine for Demos more than 20 years ago).

The workings, strengths and weaknesses of deliberative assemblies and citizens’ juries have been exhaustively studied over several decades by countless academics and institutions, from the pioneering professors James S. Fishkin and Robert C. Luskin (of Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin respectively), to the Electoral Reform Society, the Centre for the Study of Democracy, and UCL’s widely admired Constitution Unit.

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Wanting to incorporate a randomly-chosen assembly into national politics may not be a mainstream position. But it is intellectually respectable.

My purpose in writing People Power was to nudge that respectable idea a little nearer to the centre of national debate. I quote with pride Alex Burghardt MP’s verdict on my book: “It’s not as crazy as it sounds.” (By my standards, that’s a five-star review.)

But the proposal at People Power’s heart deserves to be taken more seriously than that. Traditional politics is in crisis. The collision between direct democracy and representative democracy has left Parliament floundering and ineffectual. Yet a proposal to take radical corrective action is considered crazy, while wanting to carry on as before is considered sane. That’s the sad irony of foreseeable disasters. Evasive action seems worthwhile only if you leave your mental comfort zone – or when it’s too late.

In fact, since my book was published, there has been a surge in mainstream support for giving randomly-selected citizens a role in national politics. (The Daily Politics, by contrast, has disappeared.) The proposed role has been a specific one: breaking the deadlock over Brexit. But the thinking is much the same.

Nearly 80,000 people have signed an online petition calling for a Citizens Assembly on Brexit. Their case has been made by heavyweight thinkers and politicians – and even, once, in the Commons. Right now, their cause seems like a lost one – although it would be foolish to rule anything out where Brexit is concerned. Yet sustained exposure is gradually drawing the idea of sortition-based politics into the mainstream.

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It is telling that a Citizens’ Assembly on climate change is a key demand of the striking schoolchildren of the Extinction Rebellion.

What all these enthusiasts appreciate is that consulting the public in a sortition-based deliberative assembly is quite different from casually asking voters for their views in polls and referendums. Like jurors in court, participants in such assemblies are focused and informed. They interrogate evidence and examine conflicting views. No one whips them to put party before country. Trained conveners ensure that all are heard. The emphasis is on discussion, not winning; shifts in opinion are common. And the conclusions, like juries’ verdicts, are generally accepted as fair.

Everything we know about such bodies shows that they tend to heal division rather than exacerbate it. The discussions are conversations, not confrontations. In an age of political polarisation, this is precious. Parliament is pre-occupied with party-political arm-wrestling; public political discourse consists mostly of mud-slinging. The combined effect is endless political mud-wrestling: dirty, violent, unedifying and – if continued too long – dangerous.

Political traditionalists usually object that a randomly chosen cross-section of society would produce a ‘lower calibre’ of person than the processes that provide the current members of the Commons and the Lords.

I don’t think this bears scrutiny: not just because the calibre of many current members of Parliament is so obviously and embarrassingly low – or because, despite what people in Westminster think, the average citizen isn’t a moron – but because the main point of a democracy isn’t that it results in a nation being governed by its wisest members. Most democratic nations aren’t. But their systems of government work – when uncorrupted – because their decisions command popular consent.

In People Power, I quote approvingly the words of Dexter Perkins:

“The best wisdom is to be found in the collectivity, not because any member of the collectivity is himself as wise or as well informed or as disinterested as some notable individuals may be, but because the reconciliation of the wills, the aspirations, and the interests of all, even the prejudices of all, provides a more solid and enduring basis of action than the will, the aspiration, and the interest of any individual or any class.”

That, in one sentence, is the case for democracy. It is a merging of interests. Sadly, such a merging has barely featured in the UK’s recent contortions over Brexit. Democracy of a kind has been involved, but only the kind that divides. If you expect what follows to have an enduring basis, your appetite for far-fetched political ideas is stronger than mine.

The point of a Citizens’ Assembly isn’t to secure a particular outcome. It’s to detoxify politics, through a visibly fair mechanism that cannot be dismissed as an establishment stitch-up. With Brexit, it could have rebooted the entire seized-up process; in Westminster, it could restore the the credibility and perceived legitimacy of Parliament.

The economic fall-out from our Brexiting (hard, soft, fudged or reversed) will pass. Perhaps it will be less than some fear. But the political and social damage feels more permanent, and could prove disastrous if we cannot find the courage to address it. Is it really so crankish to consider seriously a mechanism that could set us on the path to healing?

Perhaps it is too late to bring that mechanism to bear on Brexit. Yet the need for detoxification remains. The political establishment is more hostile than ever to the idea of empowering randomly selected citizens: a trial programme of local citizens’ assemblies has just been radically scaled down. But I have yet to hear of a more sensible idea for achieving the healing we need.

People Power: Remaking Parliament for the Populist Age, by Richard Askwith (Biteback).

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?