I was a local government reporter three decades or so ago. I remember one crusty old Labour councillor telling me, with some pride, that he put any letters from constituents addressed to his home unopened in the bin. They were not treating him and his position with sufficient dignity, he said. I remembered that last night as the results poured in, because it was a measure of what local government used to be like – pompous, opaque, patronising, closed and inefficient. Those were the days when people were occasionally allowed in to meetings to listen, but never to speak.

I remember it now, at a bitter moment for lifelong Liberals like me, because the decades that followed saw the party as history’s chosen instrument to turn those councils inside out – letting people in, devolving power to neighbourhoods, kickstarting recycling and green energy and much else besides.

I don’t think it helps anyone to spin a terrible result. We’re human beings, not cold-blooded, technocratic robots. And it hurts. The Liberal revival, which may or may not have fizzled out yesterday, was part of my life. It began with the Torrington byelection in 1958, the year I was born. I joined the party partly because of its brave stand against the Sellafield reprocessing plant in 1978, and partly because my local Liberal candidate gave me a two-hour interview the day before polling in 1979. I was convinced and toddled off to join.

I remember how thrilled I was to sweep through a neighbourhood delivering Focus leaflets with 20 or so other young people, at a jog. We believed in the inevitability of the cause – to take power in order to give it away. We felt like the political wing of the counterculture that grew up at the same time. Since then, I’ve watched those I ran with age at the same rate as me (possibly even faster) and take their seats in parliament. I saw them wrestle with government.

What happened? There was a clue in the email I received yesterday morning from one of the party’s radical stars of the 1990s, taking exception to the slogan “stability, unity, decency”.

“I joined the Liberal party because I hungered for change,” he wrote, “radical change to make the world a better place, not to keep things as they are.” The problem is that the trauma of coalition moulded the party into a deeply pragmatic force, provided them with the dullest manifesto in political history, with all the hallmarks of having been written in Whitehall.

They say that Labour’s left-leaning campaign has been tested to destruction. That may be so, but the opposite is true for the Lib Dems. The idea that they could win territory campaigning just to mollify the extremes of the others has also now been tested to destruction. In fact, I’m not sure there is a role for the party unless it rediscovers its capacity for crusading in the country, rather than just quietly in the corridors of power. Nobody else could have performed with the skill and charisma that Nick Clegg has, and I’m proud of what my party achieved in power, but there appear to be no votes in compromise – at least for its own sake.

Now we’re back to the position we were in when I joined the party, I’m fearful of the prospect of permanent Conservative rule – furious that their negative campaign has succeeded, angry at what seems to me to be the inevitable break-up of the union, because the establishment failed to reform the voting system when it could have done.

The danger now is that Liberal-minded people will go into business instead, or academia, and those voices will be lost to the nation, just when they are needed. David Steel’s proposal yesterday for a new constitutional settlement will almost certainly not happen now, though heaven knows it should. It is a reminder that a great deal needs to be done. There is still a role for the radical heart of the party, if they can rediscover it.