After a snap contest whose abbreviated timetable was tailored to his advantage, Boris Johnson won the vote of confidence tonight only by 211 to 148 votes, with all 359 Conservative MPs casting ballots. It is a win, but it is also a disaster for the prime minister. The real victor in the 2022 Tory leadership confidence vote was not Johnson. He is irreparably damaged. Politicians don’t recover from such things. Nor was the victor the Conservative party. The winners were the parties of opposition: Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and the nationalists. That is because, with the unpopular Johnson losing his electoral allure but now reconfirmed, but only just, as Tory leader, the opposition parties are now on course to oust the Conservatives from office in the next general election. A new Tory leader might have had time to rebuild the party’s image. Johnson cannot do that. However much Downing Street may pretend otherwise, this is not the end of the story, for three main reasons. First, and most immediately, Johnson is not yet out of the woods. That’s partly because of the forthcoming privileges committee inquiry into whether Johnson lied to MPs. But a pair of Tory defeats in this month’s two byelections – in Wakefield, where the main challenger is Labour, and in Tiverton and Honiton, where the challenge comes from the Lib Dems – would terrify Tory MPs once again and reignite the leadership issue.