Well, you didn’t really believe Boris Johnson when he said he had been “humbled” by partygate, did you?
The prime minister’s act of contrition in the wake of the Sue Gray report lasted all of five minutes before the mask slipped and he was back to his normal self.
Cracking a joke that even Dominic Raab couldn’t bring himself to sycophantically laugh at, the PM branded the Labour leader “Sir Beer Korma” in reference to his entanglement with Durham Constabulary over a lockdown takeaway.
It felt a bit like when, in the debate which followed Gray’s interim report in January, he accused Starmer of failing to prosecute Jimmy Saville when he was director of public prosecutions.
That gaffe led to a wave of criticism from Tory MPs and almost led to a vote of no confidence in his leadership. Johnson has no such worries this time.
The full Gray report is damaging for the prime minister, but not fatal.
While she says that the “senior leadership at the centre, both political and official, must bear responsibility” for the breaking of Covid laws in Number 10, she avoids making any direct criticism of the PM.
And although there are embarrassing revelations about the debauched culture inside Downing Street, with red wine on the walls and staffers drinking so much that they threw up, there is no smoking gun about Johnson’s personal involvement.
HuffPost UK has been told that “at least one” Tory MP this morning submitted a letter of no confidence in the prime minister to 1922 committee chairman Graham Brady, but they are still likely to be well short of the 54 needed to trigger a vote on his leadership.
It was also noticeable how sparse the Conservative benches were for Johnson’s statement, with one MP observing: “So few were willing to abase themselves by asking a supportive question.”
Nevertheless, the main reason why the parliamentary party were reluctant to knife him yesterday - the lack of an obvious, vote-winning replacement - still holds true today.
So Tory MPs remain strapped in to the Johnson rollercoaster - and no amount of co-ordinated tweets from supportive cabinet ministers can change the fact that, as things currently stand, it is heading for a major derailment come the next election.