‘Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable…think about these things.’

I don’t know who chose the extract from Philippians for Boris Johnson to read at the Jubilee Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s on Saturday, but given the comic timing she later showed in the sketch with Paddington Bear, it’s just possible that the Queen had a hand in the reading.

Add in the booing he received on turning up at the church, and then having to sit through the pageant on Sunday having just been told he was going to face a no confidence vote, and it is safe to say the Prime Minister won’t look back at the bank holiday weekend with quite as much fondness as the rest of us.

Not that his working week started much better. At 8am on Monday morning, exactly the same time that a tube strike was starting in London, Graham Brady announced the vote would take place that evening.

Over the years, Conservative MPs had gained the moniker of being the world’s most sophisticated electorate. So sophisticated, in fact, that phones had to be banned from the voting room so that MPs couldn’t take photos of their voting slips to prove to party whips who they had voted for.

The salutary lesson from previous such votes is that if a sizeable chunk of the party vote against you, you’re in trouble. Theresa May won hers in 2018 by a larger margin and resigned six months later.

John Major won his ‘back me or sack me’ leadership contest in 1995, also by a larger margin, surviving only to suffer a landslide defeat in the next election.

Older readers may remember a phenomenon called the Men in Grey Suits, a collection of party grandees who at such points would step in and quietly tell the party leader it was time to go.

But as one former cabinet minister told the Sunday Times at the weekend, if the chief whip turned up with a brandy and a revolver, ‘Boris would probably drink the brandy and shoot the chief.’

So instead, the humiliation of having 148 MPs vote against him is spun as a ‘handsome’ and ‘convincing’ win, together with lots of guff about getting on with the job and drawing lines – presumably underlining the previous lines drawn a fortnight ago after the Sue Gray report.

But in another couple of weeks, when the Conservatives will likely lose by-elections in the north to Labour and the south to the Lib Dems, the whole circus will start up again.

As the Prime Minister himself said in St Paul’s on Saturday, think about these things.