This vote of no confidence could end Boris's career – and give May the exact boost she needs

When Winston Churchill, to everyone’s great surprise, lost the general election in 1945, at the end of the war he had inspired the country to win, his wife Clemmie is supposed to have said that “it may well be a blessing in disguise”. Churchill replied, ruefully enough: “At the moment, it seems quite effectively disguised.”

The same goes for Theresa May and the vote of confidence. It is being treated with all the usual fevered excitement that, admittedly, a major news event deserves. And yet she will probably win it, and do so comfortably, if not impressively. It will do her the world of good to refresh her mandate. A majority of one is in fact enough for her to carry on, and to claim her mandate to do so. It is how democracy works; she’s been a lame duck for ages, and, to borrow her phrase, “nothing has changed”. In fact things may well have changed radically for her greatest rival, Boris Johnson.

Looking over at Jeremy Corbyn, she may well, if grudgingly, admire the way he defied his Commons enemies and survived votes of confidence – leadership challenges and front bench resignations included. So now they have at least one thing in common.

Life goes on, and this little interlude will actually only show how weak her enemies actually are – divided among themselves between Remainers and Leavers, and, within that, between the various proponents of a People’s Vote, “Norway Plus”, “Canada Plus Plus Plus”, or a WTO no-deal Brexit.

The list of rivals is long, and the “dream tickets” less than compelling: Gove-Rudd anyone? Javid, Johnson, Hunt, McVey, Mordaunt, Williamson, Raab, Gove, Leadsom, Davis, Hammond, Rudd, Patel – the list of possible contenders is dizzying in its variety and mediocrity. Weak embattled leaders going through crises always survive because their enemies become more fractious the closer the crown hovers into view. That is how Harold Wilson and John Major carried on.

So this confidence vote will be rapidly overtaken by more momentous events and will prove nothing new – we already know, and have done since the botched election last year, that her colleagues don’t think much of her and she is only there because they can’t agree on a suitable replacement. Because there isn’t one, in fact, though there are plenty who think they could do a better job.

May will also have security of tenure for a whole year, in which case, if things go according to plan – admittedly a dodgy assumption – she will be well into the negotiations about the UK’s actual future relationship with Europe and, again an optimistic thought, the mechanisms by which the hated “backstop” can be abolished. Boris Johnson may well look like yesterday’s man by 2020.

Given that she will do anything to make it to the next week, day or morning of her political career, she might make it clear to her MPs, privately or publicly, that her work will be over when she gets the UK out of the EU on 29 March and anyway has no interest in leading them into the next election, but that would just send even more leadership hares running. A period of (relative) stability for 2019 under May could be the least worst option in the circumstances. The current arguments about the withdrawal deal will be history soon enough, and the agenda will have moved on. Eyes will turn to a younger generation of possible successors.

In which case Boris Johnson is the one whose leadership ambitions will lie in ruins by the time he climbs into bed this evening. Perhaps – like the Miliband brothers – he will find himself overtaken by his younger, better looking brother Jo.

Today is a vote of confidence in Johnson as much as May, and an invitation for the parliamentary Conservative Party to take a gigantic gamble. I doubt they have the guts to do it. They’ve merely made the Conservative Party look incompetent and divided. But we knew that too.