Tragically, your columnist was not one of the 1200 souls approached by the Fairfax/Ipsos pollsters for the latest political opinion poll. Its findings were published with the usual Fairfaxian fanfare on Monday.

“I don’t understand it. I never get polled,” I grumbled to Socrates (470BC–399BC) the great Greek thinker and my ever-present intellectual hero.

Regular readers will know that it always seems to me that he is at my elbow, in my study, as I craft these columns. Famous for his maxim that “The unexamined life is not worth living” he will never let me hold an opinion without challenging me to examine why I think what I think.

The chosen Fairfax/Ipsos 1200 were asked to judge PM Morrison and Labor’s Bill Shorten, to say whether or not they thought these giants “competent”, “open to ideas” and “trustworthy”. Did they, the polled, see in either man a “clear vision for Australia’s future”, but also perhaps a worrying readiness to be “easily influenced by minority groups”?

The lucky polled were even asked if they thought either man “has the ability to make things happen”. By 54 per cent to 46 per cent the polled in their wisdom thought Scott Morrison the more likely to make our nation pulsate with these unspecified “things”.

“No, I just don’t understand it,” I grumbled on to Socrates.

“You’d think I’d be just the sort of person political pollsters would want to poll. I have an Honours degree in Political Science and bring a highly polished intellect to every issue.”

“Ian, it’s probably your intellect that disqualifies you,” Socrates diagnosed.

“Scholarly, agonising, mind-wankers, trained by intellectual giants like me to examine every opinion you have, are a total, impossible pain in the bum for pollsters. Here, I’ll show you what I mean. I’ll pretend to be a Fairfax/Ipsos pollster and to ask you Monday’s poll questions while you pretend to be one of the plain polled.”

“But how do the pollsters know to avoid me? How do they know I’m an intellectual?” I marvelled.

“I’m not entirely sure,” Socrates said, “because we didn’t have social media in ancient Athens. But it may be that like artful advertisers they harvest some of this new-fangled ‘granular data’ about you, from your social media habits, and know who and what you are. Your arty-farty YouTube habits are a real giveaway. All that pretentious opera and art. Your eggheadedness sticks out like the proverbial. But let’s get going. I’m the pollster, you’re the polled. Ready?”

Almost three intellectually exhausting hours later, with a drawn-out pollster/polled interview designed to take only a snappy 10 minutes, Socrates and I were still not finished.

With every Fairfax/Ipsos question put to me I’d been incapable of a ready, snappy answer. I’d uttered many a “Can I get back to you on that one tomorrow after I’ve thought about it?” I had often mused to my pollster that, well, it all ill depended on what was meant by concepts such as competence, openness to ideas, trustworthiness.

And what if, I challenged, the qualities included in the questions as obvious virtues (for example having “a clear vision for Australia’s future”) or as obvious weaknesses (for example being “easily influenced by minority groups”) were not obvious at all? Surely some of the clearest of visions are held, mistakenly, by the most awful of people. The appalling Boris Johnson has a clear vision of his being a reincarnation of Winston Churchill and of it being his, Johnson’s, Churchillian destiny to make Britain great again by saving it from Europe. Isn’t a leader’s clarity of vision often a dangerous, delusional, narcissistic thing? What if a leader’s opaque vision of Australia’s future is more desirable?

And what if being influenced by “minority groups” is a virtue? Surely it depends on the minority groups and what they stand for? One shudders at the thought of a political leader paying rapt attention to the Church of Scientology, to the Sporting Shooters Association, to cults like the Young Liberals. But then one delights at the thought of him or her being open to the ideas of progressive advocates of renewable energy, of the humane treatment of refugees.

Socrates and I agreed, after hours of this, that opinion polls are blunt, clunky tools that hardly seem to measure anything worthwhile and can never capture the views of people who need time to think.

Socrates is scathing about them, opinion polls, and thinks it’s a shame their inventor, George Gallup, was ever born.

“Polls are vox pop but also a kind of fog pop,” Socrates scoffed, “collecting the fog the average ignorant voter has between the ears.

“It’s only fog, but alas in recent years we see you Australians using opinion poll results as reasons to dump leaders. We see, instead of leadership, a kind of cowardy custard ‘followship’ by which political parties only ever dare do things opinion polls show are popular with the befogged.

“So, Ian, what are you up to this weekend?” Socrates wondered, later.

“Thrilled to say I’m going to see Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Pop-Up Globe in Sydney! Rapture!”

“And you wonder why pollsters never poll you!” the giant of Western moral philosophy sighed.

“They’re looking for the man in the street, but you’re that unrepresentative, unAustralian oddity, the professor in the quadrangle, the poet on the headland, the flower-arranger in the parlour, the Shakespeare geek at the pop-up Globe.”