What will Boris Johnson do now? Deliver Brexit, unite the country and defeat Jeremy Corbyn, he said today in his victory speech. But how? Some of his most important decisions will be made very shortly – and they will involve who he puts in his cabinet. Johnson is not a details man, or a man who delivers on his promises, or a man with a particularly strong or comprehensive vision for the future. His ministers will decide the country’s next direction.

On Wednesday, in her last major speech, Theresa May lamented a growing culture of absolutism in politics. Introspection was never her strong suit, and this speech to the Chatham House thinktank was no exception. In a scarcely veiled swipe at the populist right, at home and abroad, she bemoaned an “inability to combine principles with pragmatism … [from those who believe] that if you simply assert your view loud enough and long enough you will get your way in the end”.

The day after Jeremy Corbyn scraped together the parliamentarians’ names he needed to get on the Labour leadership ballot in 2015, he headed off in search of voters. “We didn’t have a campaign. We didn’t have an organisation. We didn’t have any money,” he told me. “All we had was my credit card and that lasted for about a week.”

Last week Boris Johnson delivered a speech to a Royal Horticultural Society audience in Wisley, Surrey, before heading to the affluent village of Oxshott to buy some fennel and tarragon sausages and have a cup of tea in the Munch and Wiggles cafe. In a series of interviews later that day, he was unwilling to reveal the provenance of the staged photograph of him and his partner, Carrie Symonds. He was, however, able to insist that Britain would leave the European Union, “do or die”, by the end of October.