“I’m not detecting any massive groundswell of movement towards the Labour Party or excitement for their agenda,” Rishi Sunak told reporters. He’d just come out of Conservative headquarters, so this was probably true. Much of the movement in there was presumably towards LinkedIn, as staff tried to work out whether they could still get a corporate job to cash-in on their Tory connections before the party is consigned to opposition.

Over on the radio, David Campbell-Bannerman, of the Continuity Boris movement, was explaining that everything would be better if Old Haystack Hair was in Number 10. From the man himself we hadn’t heard, beyond a video recorded in the back of a car somewhere, presumably as he was whisked from lucrative speech to Caribbean island. Johnson’s efforts to get his old job back are all the proof anyone could want that piles of cash can’t buy happiness. The thought of the former prime minister’s deep misery as he moved between his borrowed mansions is the comfort that the rest of us need to get through these tough times.

It was a bad day, too, for what we might call “comfort journalism”

There’s plenty of misery to go round in the Tory Party these days. “It’s been a really terrible night for us here in Plymouth,” Johnny Mercer, the local MP, told the BBC as results were read out behind him. “We take it on the chin,” he added, before being drowned out by cheers from Labour activists at the news that they’d taken control of the council. Mercer generally resembles a Labrador in his zest for life. His expression at this point suggested he’d just learned there would be neither dinner nor a walk following the mess he’d made on the living room carpet.

“We always said it was going to be a very difficult night for us,” the Tory chairman, Greg Hands, incanted. In fairness to Hands, people scoffed when he’d said his party might lose 1,000 seats — the kind of expectations management people do ahead of these votes so that losing 500 looks like a victory. Now that prediction was looking near the mark.

Later Hands would be replaced for broadcast duties by Chris Philp, who has been assigned to some kind of punishment battalion for his crimes as Chief Secretary to the Treasury during the Truss weeks. Philp would tell anyone who would listen that Labour simply wasn’t doing well enough. In which case, what does it say about the Conservatives that they’re losing so badly to them?

It was a bad day, too, for what we might call “comfort journalism”. For months we’ve been told that, if only we squint and look at the polls sideways, things were actually pretty good for Sunak. Key voter groups were really keen on the Tories. On vital issues such as whether children should be taught sex positions in school, the country was against Labour. When voters read the Cabinet Office’s report into Keir Starmer’s hiring of Sue Gray, it was argued in apparent seriousness, they would turn their back on the Labour leader.

Maybe, had that report been published and the country given the chance to learn the full horror of the Labour party’s recruitment processes, it would have made all the difference. Or maybe, when it comes right down to it, banging on about Sue Gray and wokeness are pretty thin gruel when everyone’s still on strike and no one can afford their food bill. Voters may not have settled on who they’re for, but it’s pretty clear who they’re against.