ON Planet Boris, political reality takes on a curiously different form. Having three-quarters of your backbenchers say they no longer have confidence in your leadership is regarded as an “extremely good, positive, conclusive, decisive result”.

Perhaps the result of this week’s confidence vote confirmed the old Westminster proverb: in the Commons chamber the opposition sits in front of you, the real enemy behind you.

The 211-148 vote in Johnson’s favour would, he told his Cabinet colleagues, enable the UK Government to “bash on” and focus on the things that really mattered to ordinary voters.

Yesterday in Blackpool, he bashed on with yet another attempt to reset the Conservative administration.

With a gimlet eye on those northern English red-wall seats, the PM reassured voters he was “firmly on your side” and emulated Margaret Thatcher by announcing the right to buy discount scheme would be extended to all housing association tenants south of the border; a policy borrowed from David Cameron’s 2015 Conservative manifesto.

Johnson also said lower-paid workers could in future turn their “benefits to bricks” to buy homes.

But Shelter, the housing charity, branded the right-to-buy plans “baffling, unworkable and a dangerous gimmick,” warning they would “put our rapidly shrinking supply of social homes at even greater risk”.

Johnson stressed the Government would “use our fiscal firepower” to help struggling households but gave only broad pledges about cost-saving policies, telling voters: “You can be confident things will get better.”

Tory colleagues primarily want one thing: tax cuts. Indeed, the PM signalled “sooner [rather] than later” that Britain’s high tax burden would come down, declaring: “It’s an aberration…caused in no small part by the fiscal meteorite of Covid.”

He warned a “wage-price spiral” could ensue if wages increased in line with rising prices.

Next week, he is expected to give a keynote speech on the economy, expanding on his economic approach and placing the emphasis on tax cuts for business to stimulate the economy and generate growth.

The fear is boosting incomes now with tax cuts could stoke inflation; better economically and electorally to announce any giveaways in late 2023/early 2024 – just in time for the next general election.

For all his boosterism, it coincided with reality on Planet Earth; the cost of filling an average family car with petrol hit £100 for the first time. The RAC branded it "a truly dark day".

Also, this week the OECD global economic think-tank confirmed Britain was facing 1970s-style “stagflation” with prices set to hit a 10% rise later this year with growth forecast to plunge to zero in 2023, meaning the UK would have the lowest growth in the developed world – bar Russia.

Just 48 hours after the confidence vote in which 41% of Conservative MPs said they wanted to see the back of him, the PM exuded his innate defiance and quipped his political career had “barely begun,” telling MPs “absolutely nothing and no-one” was going to stop him from carrying on in Downing Street. We’ll see.

At PMQs, the SNP champion Ian Blackford gleefully likened Johnson’s reaction to surviving the confidence scare to Monty Python’s black knight in The Holy Grail film, who dismissed having his limbs lopped off as a mere flesh wound. In response to Blackford’s jibe, Johnson spluttered: “Not even a flesh wound.”

In politics, a good yardstick of how to proceed is to judge what your political opponents would like to happen. The fact Keir Starmer, Nicola Sturgeon and Ed Davey are happy to see Johnson stick around must surely say something to Conservatives.

The Commons Privileges Committee, examining whether or not Johnson lied to Parliament over Partygate, will call several witnesses, not least Sue Gray, the Whitehall mandarin, and, possibly, Dominic Cummings, the PM’s ex-chief aide turned chief critic.

But however damning the MPs’ verdict is, Johnson is unlikely to budge. As one Tory MP told the Politico website: “He never left any of his wives; they always ended up divorcing him. It’s the same with Number 10. He’ll never leave of his own accord. The party will have to kick him out.”

It’s likely the committee will report after October’s Tory conference, which could well be a bloodbath for Johnson.

The annual event is a cauldron of conspiracy as the PM knows, as it was where in 2018 he plotted against Theresa May and her Brexit policy. That particular conference is also fondly remembered for disgruntled Scottish Conservatives creating “Operation Arse” to stop Johnson getting the Tory crown. It failed.

Yet apart from Alister Jack, the Scottish Secretary, and backbencher David Duguid, his former Scotland Office chum, who voted for Johnson this week, the tartan Tories are more or less fully opposed to him continuing as the UK party’s leader.

Douglas Ross flip-flopped yet again to vote against Johnson as did ex-Scottish Secretary David Mundell, Aberdeenshire MP Andrew Bowie and their Borders colleague John Lamont, who resigned as a Foreign Office bag-carrier.

Because they know, north of the border, the PM is an electoral liability. The latest polling suggested he had a net personal rating among Scottish voters of -71; a record low. Just how the Scots Conservatives will campaign during the 2024 General Election if Johnson is still UK leader, heaven only knows. Could we soon see Operation Arse 2.0?

Playing the Unionist card heavily as Labour will do in Scotland – not least to counter the inevitable Tory scare tactic of raising the ghost of a Starmer-Sturgeon pact, which Johnson did again this week – is likely to mean many former Tory voters will switch to Labour to try to keep nationalist numbers down.

It could be we have under-estimated Planet Boris’s ability to dodge the meteorites.

However, after what is expected to be a humiliation for the Conservatives in the two by-elections in a fortnight’s time, a damning Privileges Committee report, and the Tory conference bloodbath – not to mention the possibility of ministerial resignations – it could be before the year’s end one meteorite gets through and has Johnson’s name on it.