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Uh, anyone in the UK willing-and-able to comment on this?
From my warped, media-driven perspective across the pond, like... it looks something like this.
Boris Johnson is a frighteningly intelligent person who managed to become PM and pull off Brexit, freeing the UK from the placid bureaucratic tyranny of Brussels but also from a variety of economically beneficial arrangements with the continent
During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Boris Johnson ultimately failed to heed Dominic Cummings, turning about-face on a number of lockdown policies which Boris did not, apparently, regard himself as bound by (channeling a lot of U.S. Democrats here)
The economy, predictably, suffers; whether this is due to COVID, Brexit, both, or neither, is a question that will help many economics professors secure tenure
Maybe there is some philandering by someone important in here somewhere? Recollection vague...
A bunch of people resign from positions in Boris' administration
Liz Truss becomes PM
Six weeks later, someone gets manhandled in the Commons over a vote?
Liz Truss resigns as PM
Maybe Boris is coming back?
It's just not clear to me, at all, how Boris managed to get himself removed in the first place; it feels like he was removed for little tiny stupid stuff after massively succeeding on all the issues that genuinely mattered to him and his supporters. He apparently should have heeded Cummings on COVID (and perhaps many other things, too) and it looks like Boris reaped the consequences without actually learning his lesson. But Truss is apparently just wildly incompetent, or maybe she's just catching the blame for what is really Boris' economy?
What's really happening, there. Help me out.
Boris is not intelligent, particularly, as far as I can tell. Nor is he particularly conservative, so some of the party will always have wanted his head. What everyone I know suspects is that his run-in with the coof scared him, and he let his hysterical new wife have too much sway over him -- turning him from Brexit man into running a government based almost solely on what his wife thinks and how policies polled. His coof episode made him give into safetyism. As this is no way to run a corner shop, let alone a government, he was eventually ousted. Truss is just the prize moron slash Lib Dem sleeper agent who picked up the fallen banner.
Boris is intelligent. Unfortunately many British politicians studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) at Oxford, which is notoriously an easy subject. (Why doesn't a PPEist get up in the morning? Becuase then they wouldn't have anything to do in the afternoon) Boris studied Greats, which is basically a broad-based course in Ancient Roman and Greek society based on reading the primary sources in the original languages. It is traditionally seen as the hardest course Oxford has to offer, although the mathematicians and physicists naturally disagree. His tutors said he could have got a First if he applied himself.
Boris's vices are laziness and incuriosity, not stupidity.
I would say that the first two lead to the second.
How one can be stupid but still have a high IQ is an interesting question. You can be intelligent but lazy, intelligent but incurious, but how about an intelligent ignoramus? Laziness and incuriousity can lead someone into becoming an offensively ignorant person, would we call that person offensively ignorant yet intelligent? It seems there are more paths to stupidity than low IQ.
There's actually a far more interesting example than Boris: Kwasi Kwarteng, the recently departed chancellor.
Kwarteng has a double first & a PhD from Cambridge, and was a Kennedy scholar at Harvard. Unlike Boris and most other politicians, his degrees weren't in PPE and other broad subjects, but in economics, so he should have been primed for a position as chancellor. He even had relevant experience in hedge funds, rather than just being a former journalist, again like so many other politicians.
Kwarteng might well have the most impressive academic achievements of anyone in the House of Parliament today. And yet he blundered terribly with his mini-budget, seemingly unaware that the markets would not look kindly to low-tax and high-spend in the middle of major economic turbulence.
How exactly did someone who is probably top 1% in intelligence and in a relevant area for his skillset perform so poorly? At least with someone like Robert McNamara you can point to the Vietnam war being a very complex and difficult issue.
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People can use a high IQ to better convince themselves and others of wrong positions, rather than seek correct positions.
People can also use a high IQ to play slick verbal games which cover up for a lack of knowledge. The way Oxbridge teaches humanities subjects (you have to write a weekly essay, which does not affect your grade, but which you are expected to discuss for up to an hour with an academic specialising in the subject) is noted for training this skill. So does competitive debating (which Boris also did). Boris is one of the best people in the world at this particular form of bullshit.
You can also have a high IQ and pretend to be stupider than you are in order to appear relatable to midwit voters. Boris is good at this too.
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