Boris Johnson falls foul of the ‘you can’t say that’ rule

Last night, Sebastian Payne described Boris Johnson as being a politician who ‘prides himself on being one of the few politicians who gets away with saying the unsayable’. He was covering the Mayor of London’s lecture to the Centre for Policy Studies, where Boris said the following:

‘Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests, it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16 per cent of our species have an IQ below 85, while about 2 per cent have an IQ above 130. The harder you shake the pack, the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top.

‘And for one reason or another – boardroom greed or, as I am assured, the natural and god-given talent of boardroom inhabitants – the income gap between the top cornflakes and the bottom cornflakes is getting wider than ever. I stress: I don’t believe that economic equality is possible; indeed, some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity.’