Speaking for myself, when the preferred date format was argued in ATMB a while back, I thought the best possible choice would be, in this case, 2023-Jun-09, because it’s internationally agnostic and impossible to misread. Not sure if it’s worth further rehashing. Either way, it wouldn’t be a topic for this thread. 
I agree with pretty much all of that - our only real difference is … is he stupid?
I threw in a couple of points; here are a couple more. Despite being thoroughly briefed on the risks of COVID, he shook hands with coronavirus patients - and then boasted about it. Setting aside the hideously bad example he set, he damn near killed himself.
And then of course, there was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4AzGie3JcI
I would say that he was babbling like an idiot even before he launched into his eulogy to Peppa Pig.
j
The thing is, “intelligence” is a very broad concept, and “stupid” is even broader.
Boris is unquestionably bright enough to pass hard exams, to memorise chunks of classical texts, to command a large vocabulary. But that doesn’t mean he makes good decisions, it doesn’t mean he understands the meaning of what he memorises, and it doesn’t make him a good problem solver.
E.g. it’s intelligent to memorise Kipling’s On The Road To Mandalay, but it’s not good judgement to quote this paean to the joys of colonialism in a Myanmar temple while on a goodwill trip. So in the same breath evidence of one kind of intelligence and one kind of stupidity.
(The Peppa Pig thing is interesting because he wasn’t doing anything that hadn’t worked a hundred times in other speeches, it’s just by the time he did that one the spell had been broken and the old shtick didn’t work.)
In the hand-shaking example, in point of fact even your example is a bit misleading: shaking hands with someone with covid isn’t risky because of the touching hands, but because of the proximity, and if you were to shake hands and then move on, spending only a few minutes in that activity, it’s not actually as risky as just hanging out with people without touching.
With Boris, I suspect that there’s a high intelligence which is mitigated by psychological and character defects. The net result is often stupid (see: his entire political career), but whether than makes the man himself stupid is more difficult to assess.
Speaking as someone who passed Latin exams and has also made some completely bone-headed fuck-ups, I am happy to say that stupid is as stupid does.
I should have simplified my assessment of BJ to “All Cato and Seneca, and no common sense”.
The big mystery (or is it) is: why didn’t the Tory grandees spot it earlier? How did he get on to their approved candidates’ list in the first place?
It’s not as though his character defects were unknown at the time. I can’t be the only one to have pegged him as a wrong 'un.
Eton, Oxford, President of Oxford Union, Eurosceptic journalist, good on TV… that’s a lot of boxes ticked. Plus being a journalist meant he had good contacts and was one of the lads - lots of good write ups and a bit of a blind spot when it came to his failures.
But still! An obvious wrong 'un, like you say.
Thinking about it, I bet there was an element of, “Well, he can’t do any damage to us, it’s just those other people who’ll get screwed over.”
As I said at the time: Boris was well-known to be dishonest, corrupt, incompetent, bigoted, amoral, selfish, and to have left a string of disasters in his wake for others to clean up. And the Conservatives looked at him and said, “This is the man who truly represents who we are as a party.”