I can’t believe we need to say this, but here goes: Motorists should not pull over to allow cyclists to overtake. I know it’s obvious, but the cycling elites have been agitating for this ridiculous rule-change, led by Jeremy Vine.

In an interview yesterday, he upped the ante in his general campaign to turn the country’s drivers into a second-class citizens. ‘I’m starting to think I want cars to pull over if they see me behind them because they know I’m faster,’ he told the Sunday Times.

Thus the shark was jumped. I’m a cyclist myself and I’d wager I’m quite a lot faster than Vine. I’m younger, for a start, and in addition to commuting daily on my Brompton, on weekends I am a fully paid-up member of the Lycra brigade. True, my training has been suffering recently, as I’ve been busy with my new book but still, if Vine wants to race me, I’m confident I’d leave him for dust.

But motorists shouldn’t pull over to allow me to pass. On the whole they go faster than me. The average speed of traffic in Britain’s biggest cities is 22.6mph, which is a lot faster than Vine ever cycles, and me too if I’m on my Brompton. And even if cars are stuck in slow-moving traffic, it’s the cyclist’s job to weave his way safely through the gaps, not theirs to pull over meekly to the side of the road as if Judge Dredd was looming in their mirrors.

All this is part of an effort to pound drivers into submission. Battered by taxes, leg-swept by Ulez, tangled in red tape and shamed by the militant green lobby, these perfectly law-abiding citizens, using a perfectly law-abiding method of transport to engage in their perfectly law-abiding jobs, are being turned into public enemy number one. Anyone for a stoning? Packet of gravel?

I suspect the real problem isn’t motorists but Jeremy Vine himself. He swans around London like a member of the morality police wearing a large camera rig on his head used to film motorists’ indiscretions, which seem to occur more often in his life than anybody else I know, and edit them into Matrix-style whizzy videos. He’s a cyclist powered (rather slowly) by the fuel of self-righteousness. I’m a cyclist myself and even I can see this.

So let’s make an amendment to the Highway Code, stipulating the following: no motorist is permitted to pull over to let Jeremy Vine pass. After all, the zealots don’t represent the moderates.