“The people have spoken, the bastards,” declared Democrat hopeful Dick Tuck in his concession speech, following defeat in the 1962 California Senate primary.

Voters are not always right, and history is littered with examples of malign and incompetent governments whose path to destruction has been cleared by their justification of having a popular mandate.

The Tuck quote frequently occurs to me as the owner of a holiday home which I let to paying customers and whose collective voice is exercised through the modern, some would say tyrannical, ballot of the customer review website.

The connection between standing for government and renting a property may seem somewhat tenuous at first glance, but bear with me.

Just as we are led to believe in the infallibility of democratic government, despite some obvious examples of things going wrong – Germany circa 1933-45 springs to mind – we are also encouraged to hold to the maxim that “the customer is always right”.

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Thanks to the internet, the customer’s voice is now exerted and heard more often than at any time in human history. No matter what you buy – anything from a packet of soap powder to a jet engine – you now have the opportunity to review it and its seller online.

For more than a decade, I have owned a holiday home in Spain, which I let during the summer months to help pay for the running costs, and this is the tenth September I have arrived at the end of the season to survey the damage and take care of repairs.

The site through which I let the property has its own review section and, through this admittedly limited petri dish, I have learned some valuable things about the drivers of human nature.

One of the first lessons I learned is that you........

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