Suella Braverman was completely wrong to ask her civil servants to investigate the possibility of arranging a one-on-one speed awareness course. This is not because this was in breach of the ministerial code. That aspect of the affair was one of the worst examples of contrived, sanctimonious outrage I have ever seen; it pains me to think anyone thought it remotely newsworthy.

No, the main reason Suella was wrong to request a one-on-one course is far simpler. Attending a speed awareness course in the company of a random selection of other people is a total blast, and too great an entertainment opportunity to miss. It’s like Twelve Angry Men with motoring advice.

I have spent £90 attending West End plays which were far less amusing than my two speed awareness courses. I arrived at my first course in a foul mood muttering libertarian clichés about the nanny state, but left cheered by the intelligent teaching and witty badinage of the participants.

Sadly I was not present for the legendary moment at a speed awareness course in Oxfordshire when the attendees were supposedly asked, as is standard practice, to rate their driving ability on a scale of 1 to 10, with 5 denoting a driver of average ability. The point here is that almost everyone rates themselves a 7 or above, with vanishingly few people scoring their abilities below a 5: the exercise therefore illustrates what is known as ‘overconfidence bias’. In this case, the instructor singled out one driver. ‘You, sir, you gave yourself a 9. Would you like to revise that down?’ ‘Um, actually I was being modest. My name is Jody Scheckter and I was Formula 1 world champion in 1979.’

But had Braverman attended the course rather than paying the fine, there is another equally important bias she might have learned to overcome. This is called ‘base rate neglect’ but could also be described as ‘officials based in inner London talking utter rot about transport’.

My suspicion is that very few of Braverman’s advisers would know the first thing about speed awareness courses, since they disproportionately belong to that tragic 42 per cent of London households that do not own a car – far and away the highest in the country. The delusion in this group that cars are inessential is possible only if you live or work in central London, since that is the hub for mass transit. Yet you don’t have to live or work far from the centre for this delusion to collapse. In Westminster, 66 per cent of households have no car; in the London Borough of Havering, on the edge of Essex, where it is impossible to have sex unless you own at least a Range Rover Velar, the proportion of households without a car is 21 per cent.

The people leaning their folding bicycles against the walls of the corridors of power hence enjoy an influence completely disproportionate to their numbers, and have an experience of transport entirely at odds with the rest of the population. They have come to believe that using a car is a choice, and a bad choice at that. They see it as their mission to do everything they can to get people to give up their cars, as though driving were simply an outdated vice, like smoking or bear-baiting.

They neglect one basic statistic. For most people and almost all businesses, independent motorised transport is a necessity. Some 88 per cent of all miles travelled in the UK last year were by car, van or taxi.

One of the few infallible ways to spur economic growth is road-building, since it expands the sphere of scope of buyers and the catchment area of people selling things. Yet for some reason there is a complete lack of political will for promoting road-building. I don’t know why. Anyone starting a ‘Motorists’ party’ in 2023 could easily find themselves the next Nigel Farage.