The problem with democracy is that you can never trust the voters to do what you want them to. The same also holds true for shareholder democracy, and there were few better signs of this than the unceremonious dumping last week of the entire board of Eurotunnel, the long-suffering builder and operator of the Channel Tunnel, by a rabble of individual shareholders.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher whose book The Social Contract helped inspire a rather more important French Revolution more than 200 years ago, would not have been proud of Nicolas Miguet, the self-proclaimed revolutionary who led the campaign against the board. Neither would he have been proud of the Eurotunnel board.