Is the era of shameless, corroded leaders behind us at last? Brigid Delaney

In a just and fair city, according to Plato, it's the philosophers who rule. These philosopher kings combine politics with philosophy - leading from a more rarefied plane than those beholden to factions, favours and personal enrichment. These idealised rulers were less concerned with raw power than the application of wisdom, justice, temperance, courage and reason.

Throughout the history of liberal democracies, a link has persisted between good character and leadership, even if it has often been maintained tenuously or fraudulently (think of Bill Clinton saying: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman"). Even amid such hypocrisy, there has at least been the appearance of a common unspoken understanding that character and the highest offices of leadership are intrinsically linked.

That link was broken during the strange epoch of the leadership of the US president Donald Trump, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison and UK prime minister Boris Johnson. Trump and Johnson were leaders who not only basked, Machiavellian-like, in power for its own sake (and resisted attempts to make them relinquish that power) but were nakedly open - celebratory, even - about character traits that would have once been considered shameful and hidden. They could not be accused of hypocrisy because their personal selves and their political selves were in appalling alignment.

Trump nodded to this shift when he said he could kill someone and it wouldn't matter ("I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn't lose any voters, OK?"). And you knew at the time, deep in your bones, that it probably wouldn't.