We hear that the next Conservative government intends to slash the current administration's bloated budget for consultancy. Could they not improve the quality of public discourse at a stroke by consulting that old Tory, Dr Johnson? Imagine a short edict going out to every civil servant and quangocrat in the land: "Never suffer any careless expression to escape you or attempt to deliver your thoughts without arranging them in the clearest manner." Johnson would instantly have seen the emperor's new clothes on the back of the modern phenomenon of consultancy, predicated as it is on jargon, cliché and linguistic obfuscation.

What Johnson knew, and imparted to his readers without a single careless expression, was human nature in general and the character of Englishness in particular.

The son of a bookseller, he dropped out of Oxford because he was unable to pay the fees. He began his career as a schoolmaster. The school failed and he walked from Lichfield to London with his pupil David Garrick, who would become the greatest actor of the age, perhaps of any age. Johnson's admiration for him knew no bounds, yet he always harboured doubts about the theatre. That was partly because it was hard for the sometime master to find himself struggling to forge a living from his pen in Grub Street while the pupil found wealth and unprecedented fame on the boards. But it was also because the actor's art of flighty impersonation was at odds with the supreme Johnsonian virtues of integrity and sincerity.

In the preface to his earliest work, a translation of a traveller's tale, Johnson noted how the story revealed that human nature is the same in every nation. In every individual and every community we find "a mixture of vice and virtue, a contest of passion and reason." Johnson's was an exemplary life because he was steadfast in his pursuit of virtue and reason, whilst never denying his own vices and the power of his passions. He knew humankind's need for a moral and spiritual compass, but also recognised the force of our bodily desires.

James Boswell — himself a man of gargantuan bodily passions — caught this duality to a tee in The Life of Samuel Johnson. There is a marvellous moment early in the book when in one sentence Dr Johnson asks Garrick not to invite him backstage any more because "the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities", then in the next breath Boswell writes: "In 1750 he came forth in the character for which he was eminently qualified, a majestick teacher of moral and religious wisdom."