The Labour tribe is beset with anguish and fear for the future. Its defeat was on a scale that no one saw coming, and is marked by an arithmetic that renders the path back to power punishing at best, impossible at worst. Set against what happened to Britain’s former third party, however, Ed Miliband’s drubbing becomes a smack on the wrist. Where Labour lost 10% of its parliamentary representation, the Liberal Democrats lost 86%. Existential questions confront them.

Most of the second places were distant, and the councillor base has shrivelled by well over half, leaving little to build on. Former MPs such as Julia Goldsworthy, who fought bravely to overturn narrow 2010 losses, were utterly crushed. Seats such as Winchester, which were won in the recent past, are suddenly way out of reach. There is not one Lib Dem MP in the Scottish mainland, nor in the former heartland of the English south-west. Nick Clegg achieved a share of power, but bequeaths a ghost of a party.

After five years of propping up an increasingly rightwing Tory-led government, some will say the Lib Dems got what they deserved. Certainly, Mr Clegg made some grave errors. He should never have suggested, as he did in 2010, that the distinction between the Conservative “big society” and the liberal vision was merely semantic. He could, and should, have killed Andrew Lansley’s NHS reforms. He could, and should, have grasped the costs of ripping up his promise on student fees. For such mistakes, the Lib Dems have paid a far higher price than Labour paid for Mr Miliband’s shortcomings.

All this is true, and yet it is true too that the Lib Dems were frequently a moderating, and on occasion a truly positive, force within the coalition. Even in social security, a field in which they ultimately proved disappointingly willing to fold, they postponed the serious Conservative assault for a couple of years. On the core liberal territory they proved more determined – defending human rights, seeing off the snooper’s charter and rallying to defend equality laws. It has taken precisely one week of majority Conservative government to remind Britain why, in the absence of a liberal party, one would have to be invented – and indeed, why one will now have to be reinvented and rebuilt.

Suddenly and unexpectedly freed of his partners, David Cameron reappointed a home secretary who moved within hours to reheat her plans to mandate record-keeping of internet browsing histories, a significant precondition for mass surveillance. Next came the installation of Michael Gove at the Ministry of Justice, a chilling signal of willingness to do battle with Strasbourg. By midweek, No 10 was letting it be known it would like to widen the scope for ministerial vetoes on freedom of information requests. Through it all, there has been a drumbeat of the ruthless Tory statecraft, which is always the antithesis of Lib Dem interest in principled constitutional reform. A new constituency map, which will favour the Conservatives, rapidly emerged as the first priority here. The second is likely to be blocking Scottish MPs from voting on English laws, a change that boosts the Conservative majority, but whose sweeping implications have scarcely been thought through.

In all of these areas, most of the Lib Dems who could previously have checked and balanced in the Commons are no longer there to do so. Even if Labour were not as bewildered as it is right now, it could not be relied on to do the same. It is just as often authoritarian as it is libertarian, and – with the impressive exception of the early Blair years – it has been constitutionally conservative through much of its history. Anyone concerned for liberty must hope that either Tim Farron or Norman Lamb, the two men vying for the dubious pleasure of taking over from Mr Clegg, will prove able to rebuild something from the ruins he leaves behind.

The task is daunting, but it’s been done before. After the 1950s and the late 1980s alike, the British liberal tradition came back from the wreckage of the Liberal political vehicle. Slowly and painfully, it must now do so again. In the meantime, the individual lovers of liberty who have always been found in the two big parties must realise the special duty that rests with them. While the Lib Dems remain on the floor, other voices will have to be raised in support of freedom.