You can’t trust the will of the people

Abraham Lincoln’s ringing declaration echoes down the years. His 1863 Gettysburg Address, delivered 160 years ago this Sunday, gave us ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’: a clear and simple formulation, it has come to be seen as the very definition of democracy.

But Lincoln was wrong: wrong then and wrong now. Government of the people? Yes indeed, after a fashion. Government for the people? Of course. But government by the people? The advent of social media and almost hourly opinion polling reduces that argument to absurdity, throwing its flaws into sharp relief. For me, a curious incident in which I was involved at St Pancras station recently illustrated this.

I had boarded the last train of the day with a connection to Matlock. Seated in the rearmost carriage and awaiting our train’s departure at 21.02,