A leader going straight to the people, over the heads of the press, is an old move. What's new is how carefully the questions now get chosen.

The picture on offer this afternoon was an old and flattering one: a leader stepping past the professional questioners to meet the public directly, on the public's own ground. It's worth asking where that picture comes from, because the borrowing gives the game away.

Before the secret ballot arrived with the Ballot Act of 1872, British elections were settled at the hustings — an open platform, in the open air, where candidates were nominated, spoke, and were questioned, heckled and pelted by whoever turned up. That was direct democracy with the roof off. It was also genuinely perilous for the candidate: you could not choose your hecklers, and the crowd could turn on you within a sentence. Today's fondness for "going straight to the people" reaches back, knowingly or not, to that unscreened square.

The nearer ancestor is more precise. On 29 August 2012, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to hold a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" — half an hour, about ten questions, the site collapsing under nearly two million readers. It set the template a British Prime Minister-in-waiting followed this afternoon. And the questions rhyme across the thirteen years: one of the most-noticed put to Obama came from a recent law graduate, heavy with debt, asking what hope there was for a generation that had done everything right. Change the accent and it could have been posted today.

Here is where the myth and the record part company. We tell ourselves these formats are democracy stripped back — the citizen and the leader, no one in between. The long trend is the reverse. The hustings could ambush you; the live radio phone-in could catch you cold; the AMA lets a campaign and its moderators decide which questions are taken and which slide quietly down the page. Each step toward "the people" has also been a step toward more control over what the people are allowed to ask. The format that looks most open is, in practice, among the most curated.

That is the British reader's takeaway, and it isn't a verdict on the man. The Makerfield MP who may hold Number 10 within weeks chose a venue his critics call stage-managed and his supporters call direct — and both are describing the same room. The town square was never as open as the fond memory of it, and the new one is entered by choice and with care.

Why it matters here: When a politician says he is going over the heads of the press to reach you directly, the long record advises the caution the hustings once demanded of him. Over two centuries, "direct" has come to mean more controlled, not less. That's worth holding before you judge how much scrutiny a session like this truly delivers.