When my dear old grandmother was in politically expansive mood, she would often opine that the best way to sort out Britain’s (in her view, multitudinous) problems was to get “the best brains to run the country”.

Mouthed between puffing on an Embassy Mild fag and trying to pick a winner for the 3.30 at Kempton Park, it was one of a number of easy answers she had to difficult questions, along with bringing back the birch, castrating sex offenders and sending immigrants back to where they came from.

Her public policy pronouncement presupposed that that Nobel prize-winning economists and CEOs of the highest performing businesses could be forcibly co-opted into government without demurring, and that voters need not be consulted on what they might think.

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As well as summarily abandoning two centuries of representative democracy, it also ignored the reality that politics is primarily about making choices.

Having the best information to hand, which her panacea implied, should be a given in any political system, done by civil servants, not politicians.

My grandmother was a lovely woman who baked a very decent fruit scone, but I would no more have gone to her for political advice than to, say Michael Westwood, the pub landlord who launched an online campaign, calling for an immediate general election, less than six months after the last one.

Mr Westwood emerged briefly from behind the bar at the Wagon and Horses in Oldbury, to have a go at running the country and… well, the early signs suggest he should perhaps stick to pulling pints of wallop.

That his petition has been signed by three million people and shared by Elon Musk and Michael Caine, prompting a tsunami of media coverage, suggests that political debate........

© Herald Scotland