Have we witnessed Boris Johnson’s heroic last stand?

Boris Johnson came to the Commons today with the Sky News helicopter following his car on the 500-yard journey. Just before Prime Minister’s Questions, he entered the chamber and waited behind the speaker’s chair for the session to start. He was surrounded by ministers and whips, but seemed alone.

Simon Clarke, recently promoted to chief secretary to the Treasury, patted him on the shoulder as if he were commiserating with his imminent loss of office. Johnson studied his red folder of notes, relearning his lines, and started bouncing up and down on his feet and loosening his shoulders as if preparing to go on the cup final pitch. He looked at his watch and clenched his fist in front of his chest as if telling himself to go out there and give them what for.

He succeeded in psyching himself up more than Keir Starmer, who didn’t seem able to adjust to the failure of the Sue Gray report to materialise. The Labour leader was ready to do his prosecutorial thing on a document that damned the prime minister. With no document, Starmer was reduced to asking, without conviction, whether Johnson would resign if he had knowingly misled parliament.

Johnson got out of that cunning trap by saying he hadn’t misled parliament so the question didn’t arise. Instead he said he couldn’t talk about the police investigation and recited his great achievements, mainly delivering Brexit and delivering the people’s priorities, namely uniting and levelling up the country. He did it with brio, which the Conservative benches, primed to rally behind their wounded leader, cheered as if it were the greatest speech they had ever heard.

Starmer punctured the noisy Tory show with a sharp point: “They shout now. They are going to have to go out and defend some of this nonsense.” On the benches opposite, they knew that was true, and they were worried about how far they wanted to go in front of TV cameras outside the chamber.

But the Labour leader was unable to score the kind of ruthless debating points in which Johnson specialises. Starmer pointed out that the prime minister was Captain Hindsight now, having said that “in hindsight”, the “work event” in the Downing Street garden shouldn’t have gone ahead. But he lacked theatrical punch.

Some of Johnson’s defence was threadbare. He said the government was “fixing the cost of living” which will have prompted hollow laughter among much of the country that doesn’t have time to watch PMQs in the middle of the day. He boasted about “cutting the tax on universal credit”, which is one of Rishi Sunak’s more preposterous claims – that changing the taper rules for universal credit is a “tax cut”. It is, in fact, a welfare spending increase, and Labour is right to challenge the Tory spin, but it is a complicated subject and Starmer was reduced to turning to his own side and saying “cutting the tax?” with incredulity, as if everyone knows the detail.

The prime minister had another even more surprising tactic for rallying his troops. “Of course he wants me out of the way,” Johnson said in response to Starmer’s final question. “Because this government can be trusted to deliver.”

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This is jujutsu politics: using his opponents’ momentum against them. Instead of the common, too-clever line used by commentators that Labour secretly want to keep Johnson in office for as long as possible to maximise the damage he is doing to the Tory party, Johnson managed to suggest to his own MPs that he is the opponent that Starmer really fears.

He didn’t say so explicitly, but his message was that Labour want to get rid of him because they think they will have an easier time at the next election against Sunak or Liz Truss.

It is untrue. Labour would indeed much rather fight Johnson, and is really scared of Sunak, who is the most popular politician in Britain. But Johnson got away with the idea in the heat of the moment, when Tory MPs were in a suggestible mood, looking for anything to cheer because they would rather not think about the civil war into which they are about to plunge.

Johnson wrapped up the session with a new line: “He’s a lawyer not a leader.” It shouldn’t work, and it ought to be risky to use that line at a time when the prime minister is in need of legal advice about lockdown breaches, but it did work. For the moment.

As a holding operation, in one of those lulls that punctuate the prime minister’s ratchet-like progress towards the exit, it was a great success. Tomorrow, it may look very different.