Hugo Rifkind: Are those who criticise Boris for his IQ remarks just being thick? 

It’s funny, really, because most of the time I think that my university education was a bit of a waste. It was pleasant enough, I’ll tell people, but I mainly spent it sitting around, eating biscuits and smoking things. Growing dreadlocks. Getting intimidatingly good at Tekken 2 on a PlayStation. Taking some excellent walks. Just occasionally, though, I’m struck with the pleasing realisation that three years of philosophy in one of the best universities in the world did, in fact, leave its mark. Because everybody else is a total idiot.

It is not my plan, here and now, to discuss whether Boris Johnson was right, in his well reported speech to the Centre for Policy Studies other week, that equality is impossible because some people are cleverer than others. We can, however, discuss how unable vast swathes of everybody seemed to be to comprehend what he was saying. They thought they disagreed, these Twitter hordes, but they actually hadn’t got that far, because they didn’t understand what they were disagreeing with.