AT last the truth is out - and it's a truth all of us slugging away at the coalface while the fat cats dine out on our labours have suspected all along.

It simply isn't true that the brightest and the best rise to the top in our so-called meritocratic society.

The incontrovertible evidence is that to be guaranteed a place in the boardrooms of the nation, the most important quality you need is to be thick.

What is this evidence? Nothing more than the BBC's Test The Nation intelligence test at the weekend.

According to the results of the most fiercely contested event of the Bank Holiday Weekend, the cleverest people in Britain are... those who earn the least.

Non-earners (that includes students and pensioners but also, people without a job and those on benefits - the kind of person your average pampered, pea-brained director of the board would pass by on the other side of the street) have an average IQ of 107. For those earning up to £20,000 a year, that falls to 104 (about the national average). Salary earners in the £20,000-£30,000 wage bracket had an average IQ of 101, while those earning between £30,000 to £50,000 scored on average 99.

What of those fatcats? According to the BBC - and let's face it, if you can't believe them, who can you believe? - the average IQ of those earning more than £50,000 a year is a whopping 93.

What joy. All that money is obviously going to their heads - and presumably doing a lot of damage when it gets there. Take Jean-Pierre Garnier, for example. The chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline (who can expect to receive a mammoth £22 million payout should he ever lose his job) reportedly once said: "If you pay peanuts you get monkeys - and we cannot afford to have monkeys running this company."

A lovely way of putting it. He must be right. If you had a monkey running the business, it may start to lose money, mightn't it? Not like GlaxoSmithKline, which... oops, can it really be true that its share value has fallen by a third since December 2000?

Apart from sniggering behind your boss's back the next time he walks past, what does this revelation about the relationship between poverty and intelligence mean for you?

Well, in future, whenever he grants you a measly yearly pay rise, you will know in your heart of hearts that actually what he is doing is acknowledging your intellectual superiority.

Each time he pays himself a large annual bonus for driving the company deeper into the red and laying off another 1,000 of your colleagues - thus paying them the ultimate tribute of recognising them as among the country's most intelligent people - you will know that he is shamefacedly signalling to the world his low an opinion of himself. He is admitting he is too stupid not to be greedy.

If the odd snigger and a feeling of intellectual superiority isn't enough for you, at least now you know there is something you can do about it.

Want a well-paid job?

Simple.

Fake your CV so it shows you failed most of your A-levels and just managed to scrape a third-class management degree from a former poly your dad bunged a few thousand quid to, and you will be an irresistible prospect.

Prime boardroom material.

Let's face it, if you're not bright enough to trick the boardroom into thinking you are stupid, you must be thick enough to be paid more anyway.

In Chris Titley's absense, his column this week was written by Stephen Lewis.

Updated: 10:42 Wednesday, May 07, 2003