We are all ignorant. Even Oliver Kamm, my colleague on these pages, who appears to be able to recall with total accuracy the contents of every book ever published, has his blind spots. You will wait forever for a column by him on the influence of Rinus Michels’s Dutch “total football”.

Ignorance is not always something to be ashamed of. I am, for instance, almost wholly ignorant of any pop music composed since the 1970s. I am not proud of this; but I am certainly not ashamed, since it makes no difference whatsoever to my life.

There are, however, some aspects of my ignorance of which I am deeply ashamed: science, for instance, is a closed book. The older I get, the more I realise the necessity of a grounding in science for even a basic understanding of the world. And the more I regret not having paid attention at school and having, as an accurate biology report, D for quality, E for effort, “simply not interested”.

But it’s quite another thing to revel in ignorance. Jade Goody, a former Big Brother contestant, has made a multimillion-pound fortune as a result of her one recognisable characteristic — ignorance. Ms Goody established her credentials by asking: “Where is East Angular, is it abroad?” Yes, her fans were laughing at, not with, her. But Ms Goody has had the last laugh. She is back, this time as a millionaire, in the latest series of Celebrity Big Brother.

She has competition now, however. In the words of one newspaper, she is “set to clash in a battle of the bimbos” with glamour model Danielle Lloyd. Asked if Winston Churchill was a rapper, a US president, a prime minister or a king, Ms Lloyd replied: “Wasn’t he the first black president of America? There’s a statue of him near me — that’s black.”

But not everything Ms Goody says should be laughed at. She is capable, albeit unintentionally, of profound utterances. Last week, she said: “I’m the 25th most influ-inflin-inf-influential person in the world. I don’t even know what the word means.”

I stopped laughing at Ms Goody when I realised that, in a society in which Ms Goody is a millionaire icon, she is frighteningly right.

• Talking of ignorance, where would we be without Guardian columnists? My old boss, Peter Shore, the late Labour Cabinet minister used to read the Daily Express every morning just to get angry. I prefer The Guardian. Yesterday Zoe Williams informed us that “there is no precedent for a country to be diamond [or petroleum] rich and not spend the rest of its history bogged down in civil and/or external war.” I suppose that she has never heard of those two obscure countries, the US and the UK.

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