Ruth Wishart: This is the one positive of a year under Boris Johnson

Magical thinking after all is about believing outrageous nonsense on cause and effect. Like, as an entirely random example: “If I become Prime Minister, Brexit trade deals will be a doddle.”

A small and imperfectly formed Conservative membership voted two to one this week last year to be led by the man who spectacularly botched a brief spell as foreign secretary, rather than one who had run the Department of Health for half-a-dozen years. You can see their point, of course. Boris was much better at conference jokes than Jeremy Hunt. Scarcely was Johnson’s ample bottom placed on the Downing Street sofa when he decided that all this parliamentary nonsense was a bit tedious for a free-thinking chap such as himself. Why not tack some summer hols on to the upcoming conference season and just shut the whole shop up for the next five weeks?

Not that power had gone to his tousled blond head, you understand. Even if he had just defenestrated 21 senior Tory MPs who had had the cheek to try to stop him careering over the Brexit cliff without a handbrake.

READ MORE: Ruth Wishart: Here’s the nub of why the Scottish Tories face oblivion

A bonus of that wheeze was getting rid of all the grown-ups in the room, thus preventing any unfortunate comparisons with his own grasp of detail (slender at best). Besides, he had a shiny new chief of staff to deal with all of that.

Step forward Dominic Cummings, fresh from concocting fantasies on behalf of Vote Leave. Cummings was the sort of bloke who could usefully mind the shop if a PM had to pop off and get divorced, father another child, collar a new fiancée. A sort of cut-price Machiavelli. Back in the day, they used to call Peter Mandelson the Prince of Darkness. The Dom makes him seem positively cuddly.

There was the odd setback, admittedly. That damned Spiderwoman at the Supreme Court announcing that shutting Parliament down was somehow unlawful. Still, nothing that would derail the master plan for world domination: “getting Brexit done”. He had to admit Cummings is a bit of a genius with the old three-word slogan.

“Build, Build Build” – “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.” That’s the stuff to buck up the troops.

After years of Theresa’s dither and delay, BJ got the Brexit deal signed and sealed in October. Took a bit of fast talking with the Northern Irish right enough, whining on about still being tied to the south and EU rules, and border posts and tariffs and all that.

By the time these chicks were en route to the roost, nobody would remember the small print, least of all Boris. And turns out the rest of us can have a border with NI in the middle of the sea, so that’s that one sorted. Brilliant.

That Farage chap threatened to put a spanner in the electoral works with his Brexit Party. Didn’t he get that we already had one of those? Anyway, didn’t take much to buy him off. You could always blame Cummings for losing that bit of paper with Farage’s name on the list for the Lords.

Fortunately, the Labour Party turned out to be a bit of a shambles when we did go to the polls. They spent all their resources on safe Labour seats, leaving us to mop up the marginals where folks such as care workers had somehow been persuaded to vote Leave. Talk about turkeys and Christmas! It didn’t hurt that Corbyn, their great leader, ran his Remain campaign as if he was a secret Leaver. As if!

READ MORE: Pete Wishart: Boris Johnson is Yes campaign's 'best recruiting sergeant'

So, in the mid-point of the Johnson year, he won an 80-seat majority. He could hardly believe his luck. Equally awestruck is a Cabinet for whom the term third-rate seems a mite inadequate. So intellectually challenged that Michael Gove seems positively gifted by comparison. Yes, that very same Michael Gove who had recently told the public that Boris Johnson lacked the skills and morality to lead the nation (try and keep up at the back there).

Yet, as John Lennon wisely noted, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. There are conflicting accounts of when a particularly anti-social bat gave the world Covid-19, but what we do know is that over the Christmas hols Johnson was in the Caribbean sporting another new life partner and a rather unfortunate pair of Bermuda shorts. When he got back, much of early 2020 was consumed by sorting out a divorce, since it seemed that even prime ministers are legally restricted to one wife at a time. The rules are a little hazier on child numbers.

And so it was that by the time our classics scholar turned his attention back to the day job, he had managed to miss five meetings of the Cobra committee which convenes to consider emergencies.

In early March, he grasped that there was actually an emergency on the go. But it was another fortnight before the scientific advisers persuaded him that lockdown was the only option. During that two weeks, many thousands died. I daresay, with the benefit of hindsight, the Scottish Government will bitterly regret being tied to that same early timetable.

READ MORE: Ruth Wishart: A Parliament that can't pass laws is no Parliament at all

And then, of course, BJ himself got sick. Sicker than the other afflicted ministers. Pressing the buzzer for Nurse Cummings proved futile since, in defiance of all government advice, he’d popped up to Durham, a mere 259 miles further than the five-mile limit. While there, his wife’s birthday having absolutely nothing to do with it, he stuck the wean in the back of the car and jaunted off to Barnard Castle.

As he told it, at his mea-non-culpa press conference, the second trip was merely to check his eyesight prior to returning south. An explanation guaranteed to persuade absolutely nobody. Not least since his missus, a journalist, has a perfectly valid licence. Oddly, when she wrote in The Spectator of their brush with Covid, no mention was made of any exit from their London home.

That Cummings was retained tells you much about his clout. And he has been a busy boy since, orchestrating the demise of just about every permanent secretary in the civil service. The latest casualty is the woman who was compiling the report on Priti Patel’s less than winning ways with her staff. Do not expect to read it any time soon.

So one year on are there no reasons to be cheerful? Well, he’s not Donald Trump. He’s working on it, though.