They said calling the public stupid was wrong. Until the public started panic-buying petrol.

It was, the occupiers of the moral high-ground said, sheer condescension to suggest anybody who voted for Brexit did so without fully understanding the implications for both themselves and their nation.

Nobody, it seems, was thick at the ballot box.

But when people sit in a two hour queue outside the nearest Shell garage, then suddenly their intellectual abilities come under a more forensic scrutiny.

Britain is suddenly full of eejits.

Piers Morgan, ever-coruscating to anyone suggesting Brexit voters might not have deployed their entire allotment of brain cells at the ballot box, today told Twitter: “Judging by the ridiculous scenes at petrol stations all over the country, there is a massive brain cell shortage.”

(Also Piers Morgan: “If you demonise the Brexit supporters, if you tell them they are idiots and racists and buffoons and so on, it just makes them stronger.”)

Dan Hodges, Mail On Sunday political columnist, told his Twitter followers: “There is no fuel-crisis. There is no Brexit crisis. There is a people-acting-like-idiots crisis.”

(Also Dan Hodges: “Remainers should carry on mocking the “thick” people who voted for Brexit. That will show them.”)

Dan Wootton of GBNews: “There is no shortage of fuel and if there hadn’t been the media hysteria from the usual suspects it’s unlikely we would have seen the panic buying that has caused chaos and carnage at the tanks the past two days.”

(Also Dan Wootton of GBNews: “They treated Brexit supporters like numbskulls who didn’t know what they were really voting for.“

You can’t have your cake and eat it, chaps. Either you believe in the wisdom of British crowds .. or you accept that they’re as susceptible to dumbness and media manipulation as anyone else.

And if you accept that, then please spare us all your man-of-the-people pontification about how “the will of the people must be respected” etcetera etcetera.

If you can’t respect the people’s will to drain the nation’s petrol dry, why should anyone have to respect their voting for the very thing that caused the lorry driver shortage in the first place?

Clearly, people are prone to making lousy decisions based on nothing more than a gut feeling that may, or may not, bear any resemblance to actual reality. Like queueing up for 2 hours at a petrol station. Or voting Brexit.