I do not know if it has officially been measured, but my guess is that Christine Shawcroft, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, has an IQ of somewhere in the region of six. This would put her, in the global hierarchy of intelligence, directly between one of those Activia yoghurts women eat to relieve constipation and some moss.
I’m sure Christine would argue, perhaps forcibly, that intelligence is an overrated, elitist concept and that no store should be put by it. Judging people by whether they are too thick to breathe in and out fairly regularly is discriminatory. The views of an imbecile, or, say, a Jerusalem artichoke, are just as valid as those expressed by someone who can punch in the correct numbers at an ATM instead of standing there, slack-jawed and frowning, occasionally headbutting the screen in frustration while the queue behind grows longer and longer.
I’ve always been of the view that an awful lot of what the middle-class liberal left believes in is self-interest disguised as compassion. They like immigration primarily because it means their kitchen extensions, nannies and taxi drivers are all a lot cheaper. It now occurs to me that perhaps their dislike of competition, whether in sport or in intelligence testing, is a consequence of they themselves being utterly useless. This is a Darwinian view of the mentally disabled metro left. I’m sure Richard Dawkins would agree with it.
Christine recently delivered herself of the view that the best way to deal with the Islamic State is to sit down and ‘have cups of tea’ with them. Indeed, she went on, ‘Having cups of tea might actually be the best kind of system of defence and national security that you could have.’

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