It is natural, then, to be interested in Carrie Johnson, his third wife. If political writing tends to obsess on his character, she is interesting because without her he is only half a novel. She illuminates him. I could tell you some gossip, but gossip is a drug. Read it and you want nothing else. She likewise resents gossip. She was formerly director of communications for the Conservative Party and in spirit, if not title, she still is.

American journalism is mostly immune to the tactic of charm plus threats. And so last week, a profile in Harper’s magazine revealed that Carrie’s Johnson’s friend, the feminist activist Nimco Ali, spent Christmas with the family. If the arrangement was part of a childcare bubble, which has been reported, it was legal, and Downing Street said no rules were broken. It is hard to believe, though, that two functioning parents need childcare on Christmas Day, unless they are both working: were they? But the courtier journalists paid court. The Johnsons were exonerated and the essential, eternal meaning of the story — one rule for us, one for you — was not dwelt on.

Even so, to criticise Carrie Johnson without criticising her husband is unfair, and it is misogyny when the phrase Carrie Antoinette is trending, or when she is called Lady Macbeth by Kay Burley of Sky. This is the usual shrapnel around Boris Johnson; his wife is not the first person to take a bullet for him. Rather, he enables her in everything. He is an emotionally isolated man with few personal friends and, now the Vote Leave contingent has gone, few political friends. She wields vast and unaccountable political power in the old-fashioned way that women do: through him.

She is a clue to the mystery of Johnsonism, which is developing to be, besides fantastical and thrown together — like his journalism? — lazily and instinctively corrupt. There is the Christmas Day example: unless you believe that both Johnsons worked on Christmas Day, which I don’t. There is the golden wallpaper incident in the spring. The flat above No.11 was redecorated after the election for their use. We heard that the Conservative Party paid for it; then that a private donor paid for some of it; then that a trust was going to pay for it; then that Johnson, rebuked by the Electoral Commission, paid for it himself. He denies any wrongdoing. But for a prime minister to accept golden wallpaper or expect party members to pay for golden wallpaper is insane unless you see the premiership as an ongoing press trip in which everything is free.

Harper’s describes an informal culture of meetings and decisions via WhatsApp, her reluctance to have an official office which would provide a record of her actions and her use of courtier journalists as a mouthpiece. An fear of accountability is another feature of Johnsonism. It is dramatic. It is not transparent.

Suggested reading

Corbyn still haunts Labour

By Tanya Gold

Together they work together to create the parallel universe that is the heart (I joke) of Johnsonism. The country sees one thing, and he tells us we see something else. At Conference he said things which are untrue, or at least so partially true as to be lies. Wages are not rising faster than pre Covid. We are not the number one destination for direct foreign investment. Capitalism did not make the vaccine. Brexit did not enable us to reject the European Super League and establish free ports. Labour did not decide to oppose step four of the roadmap to keep the UK in lockdown. This is a collection of dreams. It is marketing. His whole career is marketing. And so is hers.

For instance, he is a feminist now. Nimco Ali said so. She called him a “true feminist”. But is he? Is his wife? Her feminism – the entitled kind that forbids criticism if the person criticised is female — is short on action for childcare and equal pay, though she is very keen on elephants, some of whom are female. Rather, she walks the waves of Carbis Bay in a red dress with a lovely child, demonstrating his fecundity, and rendering him ageless.

His feminism is as reactionary, but it is more cynical. He celebrates International Women’s Day but cuts the foreign aid budget and will not properly fund women’s shelters. (Women’s Aid estimate that the funding shortfall is now more than £200 million but he would tell you something else. God knows what he would tell you.) Instead, he says things like this at Conference: “That is what the people of our countries want us to focus on. Building back greener, and building back fairer, and building back more equal, and, how shall I . . . in a more gender-neutral and perhaps a more feminine way.” I think he came quite close to calling women flowers. But he is called a feminist, and so he must be a feminist. We will see similar campaigns on the environment and race, and they will be as dazzling.

Her friends are correct in one thing, as the stopped clock is right twice a day. Mrs Johnson is not the power behind the shabby throne; she cannot be Lady Macbeth when married to so calculating a man. I wonder if, for now, she is closer to a naïve supporter: to Banquo.

And what rankles most about all this Brexit triumphalism is that it distorts the reasons why many of us voted to Leave. I had no idea whether Brexit would be “a success”. And I didn’t vote for it because I thought it might be – I voted out of sheer principle: for me the nation state is the upper limit of democratic legitimacy. Others believed that co-operation was intrinsic to the European project, and voted for that. I respect that view, even though I don’t hold it.

Even more problematic, though, is how an essentially moral decision – and a clash of different principles – has been turned into a kind of glorified guessing game. One in which how things turn out is the only basis on which a decision should be counted as morally commendable. After all, if you save a child from drowning, and that child goes on to be some mass murderer, you don’t conclude that the saving act was a morally bad one.

The trouble is, if a decision is to be judged solely on the basis of its consequences, then we consign moral success to the swirling darkness of the future, with all its unknown unknowns, all its unintended and unexpected twists and turns. So we can never be confident that we have made the right call. In any case, at what point in the future might we judge a decision the right one – after a year’s consequences, after 10 years, a century? When do we close the book on a decision’s consequences, and proclaim some final judgment? Consequentialists don’t tell us because there isn’t an answer. In other words, they don’t have enough respect for the utter mysteriousness of the future, enough humility before the unknown.

Kant understood the alternative — that we make many moral decisions on the basis of principle and not consequences. As he put it: “A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes, because of its fitness to attain some proposed end, but only because of its volition, that is, it is good in itself … Usefulness or fruitfulness can neither add anything to this worth nor take anything away from it.”

This basic principle applies just as much to many who voted to Remain as it does to Leavers. I take it that many Remainers believe the basic principles of the EU are so morally commendable that they would regard their decision to vote as they did to be right, even if, over time, its “usefulness” seemed to tell against them. To this extent, I do not believe that the failure of the EU vaccine roll-out has anything significant to tell us about the rightness — or not — of the decision to leave the EU.

But I must acknowledge a deep problem with my position. For notwithstanding my commitment to principle over consequence, we do often accept the moral valence of consequence irrespective of intention. For example, in law, we broadly accept there is a difference between murder and attempted murder. In terms of intention, the two are indistinguishable. If I seek to shoot someone, and they trip just before the bullet reaches them, the difference between murder and attempted murder is nothing more than luck. The mens rea (“guilty mind” in Latin) is surely identical. Yet nonetheless, we treat the two actions differently. Success or failure does seem to have a moral significance here. And this moral significance is something that the philosopher Bernard Williams described as “moral luck”.

In his famous paper of the same name, published in 1976, Williams considers a semi-fictionalised Gauguin who makes a decision to leave his family and head off to Tahiti to become a great painter. For Williams, the question of whether he made the right — in some sense, the morally justifiable — decision hangs on something he could not possibly know: whether he would indeed produce works of great art. In other words, the view that would mitigate the abandonment of his family on the basis that he went on to produce some extraordinary works of art is a kind of retrofitting that could not have been justified at the time.

Williams’s essay set the cat among the pigeons. And it doesn’t feel to me like we have satisfactorily resolved the problems he raises. To what extent does future success – subject to the vagaries of change and chance – effect the rightness of a decision made? Like Kant, I want to defend an approach to moral decision making in which the rightness of the decision does not depend upon outcomes. Does the economic flourishing of China justify the human rights abuses of the Communist Party? No. The ends do not justify the means.

Suggested reading

The cost of vaccine caution

By Tom Chivers

There’s an apocryphal tale told about Zhou Enlai, the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, being asked by Richard Nixon in 1972 whether he thought the French Revolution was a good thing. His alleged response, “It’s too early to tell”, would make for a refreshing contrast to the short-termism of the modern political mind-set. It shows a proper humility in the face of an unknown future. But there is a cynicism about it too.

For if this is how we are to judge the rightness of our moral commitments, how can we ever know if we have decided right about anything. And if so, then why bother with morality at all? Because the answer to any moral challenge can be “just wait and see”. And that is another way of saying that morality doesn’t count.

Kant’s “good will” — or what I would call principle — may not suit the technocratic and utilitarian approach to politics so prevalent these days. But without it, the question of whether an action was moral or not has almost no meaning, relegated as it is to the distant court of history. How convenient for our politicians.

Consequentialist leavers may have been lucky — for now. But that doesn’t mean they were right. Something else will no doubt turn up soon for the Remainers to cheer about. “I told you so” follows an opposite “I told you so” in an endless tit-for-tat. Never to be settled as history keeps on stretching out before us, with new things to argue about, debates over Brexit will go on and on. It’s like some hideous never ending Groundhog Day. The trouble with consequentialism is that it never allows you to move on.

Politics is a funny sort of business. Half the time you end up wanting bad things to happen because it’ll help your lot in the long run. Labour moderates see the benefit of Labour’s disaster because it might help them win the party back. Centrist Conservatives wanted Boris to do badly to prove they were right that his politics was toxic.

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How I learned the Tories weren't evil

By Polly Mackenzie

There are people in Westminster quietly hoping that Boris will fail. They’re hoping the economy crashes, that negotiations with the EU fall into ignominious failure, that his efforts to rebuild the economy of the North will stumble, that A&E waiting times will rise, and that our Prime Minister will make some grotesque gaffe on the international stage that humbles him permanently. Some of these dreamers will even be Conservatives: those of a moderate hue, who want their party back from the Vote Leave tribe.

I accept that they are wishing this with the best of intentions. They believe they would do better, and they know they won’t get power unless and until he fails. But I’m done with this partisan thinking. I can’t take it any more.

I don’t want Brexit to be a disaster for communities in the North to teach them a lesson about the value of experts. I don’t want a recession to prove that economics is important. I don’t want a crappy winter in our NHS to prove the Conservatives don’t care about it. We’ve had enough bad government. Whether he is fit for high office is now irrelevant. He has it. I want him to succeed.

Suggested reading

The danger ahead for Boris Johnson

By Mary Harrington

When he launched his campaign, Boris said he would unite the country. I was sceptical he knew how. But with this majority, he has freedom to do pretty much whatever he wants. So I will take him at his word. He wants to unite the country? These are my first thoughts about how:

1. Hold the union together. Scotland is on its way out the door if we don’t take action. If anyone can understand that the economic arguments are irrelevant, it should be you, Boris. This is about identity. Go to Scotland – go 10 times a year. Wales and Northern Ireland too. Listen. Care. Convene a national conversation between the citizens, not the politicians, of all our nation states about how we renew the union: make it deeper not weaker.
2. Don’t govern from Downing Street.  You hate Parliament and all those difficult questions. Fine. Get out of London. Go on tour, and take your office with you. I’d love us to move Parliament to Manchester, but you probably won’t do that – so modernise Parliament with electronic voting so you can spend weeks at a time away from London. Make our democracy feel different.
3. Help us get to know each other. Launch a national town-twinning programme, bringing leave and remain places together through school visits, council exchanges, and cultural events. Expand National Citizen Service and give everyone a right to time off to volunteer.
4. Reinvent the honours system. Use the Royal magic to celebrate places, as well as people. Let every town get involved in choosing the people to be honoured from their place – instead of having the lion’s share of honours going to Londoners. Create honours for towns and villages, too: the right for every place to be Royal for a year, instead of only Leamington Spa and Tunbridge Wells.
5. Let people into the policy decisions. You’ve pointed the way with your plan for a cross-party agreement on social care. Don’t leave this to a bunch of politicians. Put it to the people. Hold a real citizens’ assembly, and pledge from the start that you’ll follow the people’s choices. Do you really care whether we create a charge or an insurance system? A tax or a fee? Or do you just care about getting something through so people can live in dignity? If it’s the latter, have the confidence to delegate your authority to the citizens. It’s the only way to get an agreement that will last.
6. Especially on climate change. Do the same with climate change. These are policies that need to last for 30 years or more. We need to agree them together. You’ll look good as a leader who gets things done, you don’t need to make all the decisions with only blue-blooded Conservatives in the room.
7. Open your mind to hypothecated taxes. We all know your manifesto means you’re going to be spending a lot more money, and we’ll need more tax. Treasury people will tell you that hypothecation – matching particular taxes to particular spending – is bad economics. But we need to tell a better story about what taxpayers are buying, if we expect people to pay more. So sod the experts – you’re good at that.
8. Shut up about Brexit. Do as little economic harm as you can, but don’t make a big deal of it either way.  If the nation is going to come together, we need to spend our time talking about the things we agree on.

Suggested reading

Time for Boris Johnson to show his true colours

By Matthew Goodwin

This is not a partisan prospectus. The temptation now they’ve grasped that precious majority will be to do everything they can to protect it: to change the rules of politics to make life harder for Labour, and easier for themselves. I understand why. But democracy relies on the consent of the loser, more than anything else. That is precious. You’ve beaten them, you don’t need to crush them. Great leaders are magnanimous in victory.

Of course, greatness takes effort. Ambition. Chutzpah — of which Boris has plenty. It’s not the easy road. But why be small, when you can be great?