Combating the rise of illiberal democracy and new authoritarianism that characterise countries like Russia and Hungary, and increasingly the United States under Donald Trump, is one of the great challenges of our time. The failure of mainstream politics across the West to deal with pressures from an ageing population to booming wealth and income inequality is putting democracy under unsustainable strain.

The march of the radical right, powered by grievance with the status quo and hunger for simple solutions, has seemed unstoppable. Even the few major victories won by parties and politicians in the democratic mainstream, like UK Labour’s last July, seem fleeting. However, in the form of Mark Carney, Canada’s new Liberal Prime Minister, we may be seeing the emergence of a playbook for galvanising support for liberal democracy and opposition to the radical right.

Read Mr Carney’s biography, and you will find a politician who appears to be the very definition of the kinds of global elites that so many electorates have reacted against since the Great Recession. He spent thirteen years working as a banker at Goldman Sachs, was Governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013, and then Governor of the Bank of England until 2020.

As Governor of the Bank of England, he courted controversy with statements during the Scottish independence and EU membership referendums. In 2014 he indicated that an independent Scotland would need to cede some powers to the UK to use the British pound, and in 2016 suggested that Brexit could cause a recession.

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You could hardly ask for more of an establishment insider. If it were not for the Presidency of Donald Trump, his imposition of........

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