This is what will determine when the Conservative Party moves against Boris Johnson

We live with her legacy, even though it is managed increasingly by bunglers. David Cameron, who seemed surprised to win a majority in the 2015 election, listlessly negotiated an agreement with the EU. Serial liar Boris Johnson and ruthlessly ambitious Michael Gove teamed up and quickly got rid of Mr Cameron, rehabilitating semi-feral Dominic Cummings in the process.

The impact of Brexit to the country was just collateral damage for settling scores within the Conservative Party. We then had Theresa May’s election as prime minister. That was painful. A prime minister with a slim majority who contrived to lose it in a General Election where she turned out to be a passive campaigner and who by the end of it seemed to be hollow and scarcely animate.

“Nothing has changed,” she croaked, as she ditched what had been billed as her signature policy on managing social care.

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Somehow, without a majority, reliant on Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists, and with about one-third of her party actively undermining her efforts to secure some agreement on leaving the EU approved by Parliament, she lasted another two years before finally stepping aside. That was 10 Downing Street as purgatory, not a drinking den.

May went when Conservative MPs were finally ready to accept Boris Johnson as their leader. It’s all very well for the scales to fall from Douglas Ross’s eyes and for him to want this entitled fool to go now. He was a cheerleader Mr Johnson in 2019, He became leader of the Scottish Conservatives by promising to be a Boris-backer.

Liar, philanderer and Eddie Mair’s “nasty piece of work”, Conservatives knew exactly what they were getting when they voted for Johnson – a Prime Minister who would be exceptional only for having the morals of an alley cat. Indolent, entitled, and willing to say anything if it might solve an immediate problem, he still won the support across the party which had so long eluded Mrs May.

Cummings briefly became his consigliere. He sent Parliament away. He removed the whip from Tory grandees who dared to have scruples about Brexit. Every day, Parliament seemed to be on the edge of collapse from nervous exhaustion.

However, Johnson simply needed to follow May in saying whatever his advisers concocted for him. Off he went to Thornton Manor to meet the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, where he agreed in principle that there should be no border in Ireland. It didn’t matter that this meant that there would have to be a customs border in the Irish Sea, and that such an agreement was unacceptable to the Democratic Unionists.

They should have been well-prepared for this – if they had paid any attention to Lord Carson’s lament: “What a fool I was. I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in the political game that was to get the Conservative Party into power.” Such double dealing seems to come naturally to Johnson. His purpose was straightforward: get to an election, win it, and Get Brexit Done. The European Research Group embraced his deal as negotiated by one of their own. They didn’t read the small print. More people who would come to regret their willing suspension of disbelief in the face of Johnsonian glibness.

And joining the self-deceivers was the leader of the Liberal Democrats, who imagined herself as the next prime minister, and connived to force an election at the time of Dominic Cummings’s choosing. Maybe two years of a Parliament with no working majority drove everyone demented, but the opposition parties had a measure of authority, which they threw away. Where May was painfully earnest, Johnson got through an election campaign by speaking only when he wanted to. He refused to undergo the ordeal of an interview with Andrew Neil. He hid in a fridge to avoid a breakfast TV appearance. To the list of the willingly deceived, it seems that we need to add millions of voters.

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Now, perhaps, we are in the final act. We are seeing the real man, beyond the boosterish persona: sullen, boorish, and matching ugly manners to an increasingly coarse appearance. He is discovering the immutable truth that Conservative leaders, so often lionised by their MPs, nonetheless serve at their MPs’ pleasure.

Maybe the Prime Minister will survive this coming week. Maybe he will lose a confidence vote. Much will depend on what MPs conclude about who their next leader is likely to be. If a consensus forms quickly around one candidate, then the Prime Minister will soon be out of Number 10. Otherwise, there are local elections in May. His last service to his party might well be to take responsibility for its losses in those.

There would still be two years for a new prime minister to attempt to follow John Major’s example of transforming a deteriorating electoral environment, and eke out a narrow victory.

But any other politician, tethered to the truth, would be more conventional, easier for the Labour to oppose, and, come the election, to defeat.

Whatever Conservative MPs choose, they will find the outcome deservedly painful.