A win is a win, Boris Johnson’s allies will argue.
But even Dilyn the dog must be readying to dig up bones buried in the Downing Street garden after last night’s result.
Johnson survived a vote of confidence but his premiership is surely doomed.
What Tory MPs appear to have missed, despite the target being as big as a bullseye painted on Big Ben’s clock face, is that they too are finished by sticking with this charlatan.
Many of them do not appear to realise that the Prime Minister’s arrogant, born-to-rule and rules-don’t-apply-to-me attitude, rubs off on them too.
Johnson has completely trashed the Tory brand to the extent that it may not recover.
Sue Gray has reported and the parties may be over but the public will not forget.
It is hard to imagine any other Conservative Prime Minister being booed by the public attending a royal event who, almost by definition, would be a crowd of traditionalists.
But Johnson does not represent the values of traditional Tories or anyone else.
Decency, integrity and honesty, the pillars of public life, are strangers to the bearer of the highest elected office in the land.
Far from settling the issue of his leadership, yesterday vote of confidence – which was a long time coming – has served only to define what a problem Boris Johnson is.
He is a cheat, a proven liar, a rule-breaker who pretends to be the public’s champion but really looks on them as the little people.
From here to election day, his one policy will be survival and woe betide anything or anyone who gets in the way, whether that be the EU, Northern Ireland or pesky Scots.
Johnson has the ability to destroy everything to save himself.
That is why the Tory rebels, having pinned their colours to the mast, must come again for their king.
For Douglas Ross, the pirouetting leader of the Scottish Tories, it really now is a question of kill or be killed.
Having found the dirk he dropped last month he must now keep hacking away at the wounded PM until the job is done.
What the Tory MPs failed to do in the 1922 Committee ballot, the voters of Wakefield and Tiverton, where there are two by-elections on the same day, may do in three weeks time.
The loss of both seats, one to Labour and one to the Lib Dems, would be devastating but has already been factored in by the man whose childhood ambition was to be “world king”.
The by-election losses would add to the slow death of Johnson’s premiership but really it is the hypocrisy and mendacity of the boozy parties that will undo him whenever the voters get a say.
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