Polly Toynbee, UK Guardian columnist and champagne socialist (house in fashionable Clapham and villa in Tuscany) has been rightly described by Boris Johnson as the living embodiment of “all the nannying, high-taxing, high-spending schoolmarminess “ of the liberal left.

Smug, hypocritical and humourless she epitomises the arrogant self righteousness of the BBC/Guardianista cabal that spearheads the ruling cultural establishment – a self perpetuating elite whose dominance has only been threatened once, by the premiership of Margaret Thatcher.

Speaking today at the Edinburgh Book Festival she finally laid her cards on the table

left-wing people are more intelligent, and just generally better people

The joke is – she wasn’t joking. Read The Guardian, The New York Times, watch the BBC and US networks – it’s the built in assumption that threads through every narrative.

And most people on the right, after struggling against the inertia of the left wing cultural elite eventually advocate compromise. What they fail to grasp is that the Toynbees of the world can never be defeated by coup or blitzkrieg. It’s a war af attrition, best summed up by the Duke of Wellington fighting against Napoleon during the Battle of Waterloo.

Hard pounding this, gentlemen; let’s see who will pound longest.