Chicago Notebook

In the end, it really was a fairytale. A story of hope conquering belief. The journey few believed would be completed. One man — aided by the most advanced viral campaign in history, and carried along on a mantra breathtaking in both its simplicity and its boldness: ‘Never gonna give you up never gonna let you down never gonna run around, desert you’. With that one lyric — indeed I am hard pushed to think of a single other — Rick Astley ran off with the much coveted MTV award for Best Ever Act, sending his reputation as ‘naff Eighties pop crooner’ into the stratosphere. His loyal fan base admitted to ‘rickrolling’ — a practice whereby millions of internet users were duped into voting for him by the click of a mouse. Even Rick himself sounded rather sheepish after the event.

But if that was democracy at its dirtiest, then perhaps what I witnessed, 4,000 miles away in Chicago the same week, was democracy at its purest.