In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues with great authority that you need to devote 10,000 hours to any activity before you can call yourself an expert.

On that basis I am an expert on sleep, the construction of Anakin Skywalker’s Lego Star Wars fighter and taking driving tests. And, of all three activities, the one on which I have lavished the greatest amount of time, since the age of 17, is taking driving tests. It took me just over 20 years from my first driving lesson before I eventually secured a full licence. In that time I learnt a great deal. Most of it about human nature, not hill starts. As a learner driver, I succeeded in avoiding going the wrong way round a roundabout only by driving over it and gave one instructor such a severe recurrence of post-traumatic shock that he was off work for weeks. I inflicted hundreds of pounds of damage on my car, and others, and I once provoked such a severe stomach upset in an instructor that he had to stop to be powerfully and violently ill by the roadside.

I was to driving what Silvio Berlusconi was to feminism — and, as with Silvio, so with me, the whole spectacle may have been entertaining but safety was hardly guaranteed.

Eventually, however, I passed. And I did so by learning a great lesson: the importance of dullness. The instructor who got me through trained me to think, act and drive like a robot. I think he may now be a government whip. Or a presenter of National Lottery Live. Whatever, I am forever grateful for the long hours I spent in his defiantly dull Vauxhall learning to drive as if it were a factory process that could be successfully accomplished only if all thought were banished and the mind entered a Zen-like state of total absorption.

Now I read that good old BSM, the dullest of all driving schools, and one on which I relied, is ditching the dowdy old Vauxhall, for, of all cars, the Fiat 500. That’s like throwing over Polly Toynbee for La Cicciolina. Or getting the winner of Italian Big Brother to become an MEP.

Yes, it’s more exciting. But that’s not the point. Inject glamour into learning to drive and you make the whole exercise more daunting. The Fiat 500 is simply the most thrilling small car on the market. I would no more learn to drive in one than I would rehearse a best man’s speech on Britain’s Got Talent — it takes an already fraught process and drenches it in so much adrenalin that disappointment is sure to follow.

As an expert in thrilling driving lessons (none of my early instructors wanted for adventure) let me assure BSM that excitement is the last thing they want to bring to the roads.

Michael Gove, MP for Surrey Heath, passed his test at the eighth attempt

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