There's no "ability gap" between the "elite" and the "public". The reason the "elite" have had such a bad year in Britain, the USA, and elsewhere is that they have proven themselves manifestly incompetent.

The real skills gap is between the, I don't know, maybe ninety percent of us who work in office jobs and could be easily replaced, compared to the maybe ten percent who have really invested in learning their trades (whether it be rocket science or plumbing) and cannot be easily replaced. My generation (GenX) was taught when we were kids that we should be "knowledge workers" and get paid a lot for doing very little. The end result is, most of us are in jobs where if we quit tomorrow, the boss could have a replacement hired in a month. We were pushed to be "generalists" with the idea that we could have a whole bunch of different careers, rather than spending our lives doing one thing. But the joke's on us: those people who spend their lives doing just one thing are the ones most valuable to the world.