THERE were several golden moments yesterday as Mick Lynch laid waste to an entire division of England’s ignorant media class. As the day progressed you could almost sense the tension in broadcast newsrooms as it began to dawn on early-evening and late-night presenters that they might be next for a live evisceration by the no-nonsense boss of the RMT Union.

“Let’s get him on inflation, he won’t be able to answer that.”

“Nope, he’s just schooled that thick Tory MP on what inflation means. Anything else?”

“What about comparing him to the miners? He won’t like that.”

“Did you see what he did to Kay Burley on the Miners' Strike? Try again.”

“Well, how about those modern working practices?”

“I don’t think so. He knows more about how the rail network operates than the management.”

Perhaps my favourite Mick moment was when Richard Madeley attempted to entrap him about being a Marxist. Madeley’s comic attempts at being a journalist on Good Morning Britain have made Alan Partridge redundant. Madeley’s heard somewhere that Marxism is a jolly bad thing and a danger to the country. Lynch could barely conceal his contempt: “That’s remarkable twaddle.”

Later in the day Piers Morgan showed us why he’s being paid fortunes to be the face of the new Talk TV. As his few thousand viewers sought enlightenment about the rail disruption Morgan insisted on quizzing the Union leader on his Twitter profile picture, a puppet character from Thunderbirds. “Is that the level you’re pitching at,” Lynch snorted. “It makes me laugh that your level of journalism has descended so far that it can’t think of any other question than something about the Thunderbirds.”

The Tory MP who asked him to think about “the veterans”? “You’re reading from a Tory central office script.”

The remarkably untutored Labour Baroness who tried to play the class card? “I don’t even know who you are.”

Yep: we’ll all remember the day we saw Mick Lynch take down England’s broadcast elite.

Yet, in saluting his masterclass in trade union advocacy you run the risk of patronising him and reducing his eloquence and mastery of economic analysis to a social media meme: “Isn’t it great to see a working class chap holding his own against ‘educated’ people? How exotic.”

It hinted at condescension: that Lynch is some kind of exceptional outlier who has somehow emerged from the prebiotic broth of lumpen, ill-educated working types with a sound intellect and clear mind.

One Twitter user even suggested that ‘media trainers’ had done a good job on Lynch. That seemed more palatable than the plain fact that here was a well-read, well-informed man who put his message across without feeling the need to shout above his questioners and who stuck doggedly to his facts.

There are many other Mick Lynches in the trade union movement and left-wing activism. It’s just that you rarely get to hear them. And you certainly don’t get to see them where you might expect to: in those parties elected to represent the interests of workers, like Labour. Or those parties who claim to do this, such as the SNP and the Greens. And you rarely hear them or read them in our national print and broadcast media.

Four years ago, The Sutton Trust, the organisation which measures social mobility, found that 51% of the UK’s leading journalists were privately educated and 80% of its top editors. Yet, a mere 7% of the population attend these institutions. A similar report earlier this year found that this disproportionate bias in favour of privilege had barely changed in the years since.

This pattern is repeated in all those sectors which heavily influence the way in which Britain is managed. At Holyrood, which we like to think of as much more egalitarian, you can count the number of authentic working-class politicians on one hand.

The underlying message here is that working class people who lack a degree are simply not to be trusted with positions of responsibility as they don’t have the academic wherewithal. It’s easier to believe that than to scrutinise the lazy and unsophisticated way we choose to select candidates for university or the top jobs in the civil service and politics.

Mick Lynch’s bravura performances yesterday on Britain’s main news channels didn’t simply expose the pig-ignorance of his interlocutors; it also highlighted the lies about industrial relations that have been allowed to settle unchecked into the public consciousness. And how wages have been suppressed to protect the profits being stripped out of Britain’s public assets by tiny groups of shareholders.

His performance also exposed the modern Labour Party as a sham, which operates under a false pretext. The multi-millionaire, Sir Keir Starmer would have expelled Mick Lynch by now.