Once the world had Gorbachev and Mandela. Now we have Trump, Johnson and Truss

Liz Truss and Boris Johnson in March: ‘Few seem fit to grasp, let alone match, the scale of the task that confronts us.’ Photograph: Reuters

It’s a deeply unfashionable idea. The “great man theory” of history seems terminally passé, the intellectual equivalent of a statue of a forgotten general on horseback. These days, we like to think our world is shaped not by individuals, heroic or otherwise, but by deep, underlying forces – that there is a tide of history that this man or that woman might ride for a while, but which is bound to surge ahead, regardless.

Still, this week brought two sharply opposite reminders of how much individuals count, especially those at the top. That notion matters for how we view our past, of course. But it matters even more for how we approach the present – and future.