This May marks 20 years – two decades! – since Tony Blair led the Labour Party to a landslide general election victory.

Although Nationalists and left-wingers have done their best to play down that and the two elections that followed, in 1997 Labour won 56 Scottish seats and nearly 1.3 million votes.

The Scottish Conservatives, by contrast, lost all their 11 seats and polled fewer than 500,000 votes. Famously, the Edinburgh councillor Christine Richard ended up as the most senior elected Tory in Scotland (and five years later she defected to New Labour).

There were the usual political post-mortems: commissions, reorganisations, a belated conversion to devolution, pamphlets about fiscal autonomy, punter-friendly leaders and triangulation to the centre, but nothing worked. It didn’t matter what the Scottish Conservatives said or did, voters had simply stopped listening.

They’d been denied, to quote the former Canadian Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, political “standing”, in other words the right to be heard. Now this clearly isn’t a good place for a party to find itself, for it can lead to a spiral of decline. Indeed, the 17.5 per cent vote share the Scottish Tories managed at the 1997 election didn’t represent rock bottom. Only at last year’s Holyrood election did the party manage to reverse a relentless two-decade decline.

The Scottish Labour Party now finds itself in a very similar situation. Just as the Scottish Tories were destroyed by their own flawed logic (why was administrative devolution okay but not the legislative sort?), so has the former natural party of government north of the Border. Almost as soon as it delivered the Scottish Parliament in 1999, years of proto-nationalist rhetoric came back to bite it on the proverbial.

Last weekend’s party conference in Perth represented a valiant attempt to maintain relevance. Federalism has the virtue of being intellectually coherent, or rather more coherent than independence or the status quo, but it’s too little too late (Blair should have bitten the bullet back in 1997). As the former Scottish Labour MP Tom Harris said of his old party’s constitutional proposals, they might be “brave and articulate”, but the trouble is that “no one is listening”.

There was also the usual collective amnesia about its Blairite past; speaker after speaker invoked Keir Hardie as if Labour history ended with Clement Attlee, reverting to left-wing purist type in spite of considerable evidence (step forward Mr Corbyn) that it isn’t working. The Mayor of London, meanwhile, unwittingly overshadowed proceedings with an ill-judged newspaper article. The First Minister called it “desperation”, and she wasn’t far wrong.

And just as the SNP has reached back to the 1980s for its current strategy – don’t let the evil Tories bully Scotland! – Scottish Labour has clearly got out its 1970s scrapbook. “Bashing the Nats” was the order of the day, the purpose being to solidify pro-UK perception among supporters, a clear sign that concerted Scottish Tory attacks on Kezia Dugdale et al for being “soft” on the Union have hit their intended target.

So what is to be done? At this point in my column I’m supposed to propose an alternate strategy, a course of action that’ll get the Scottish Labour Party out of the doldrums, but even if I had one it would be fruitless. It seems to me there’s little they can do except sit this one out, perhaps for a decade or so. Of course I’m not suggesting they shouldn’t continue to organise and campaign, but the party has to be realistic.

And, realistically, things aren’t going to get better any time soon. Even if, and it’s a big if, the Nationalists were to lose a second independence referendum later this year or next, it does not follow – as some have suggested – that Scottish Labour would be the beneficiaries. Rather it seems more likely the Scottish Conservatives, in a turn of events that would’ve appeared fantastical a couple of decades ago, would capitalise the most. Ruth Davidson now owns the anti-independence vote, and she isn’t going to let go.

The answer is not, as various otherwise cerebral Labour defectees appear to believe, that Scottish Labour commits the biggest U-turn in political history and backs independence. Sure, it lost a big chunk of support by backing No last time round, but it would have lost an even bigger chunk had it urged a Yes vote. And yes, aligning themselves with the then-more-toxic Tories under the Better Together umbrella was a mistake, but it doesn’t mean the arguments they agreed on were also mistaken.

Nor is the answer Tony Blair, although I was struck that even Nicola Sturgeon managed an almost completely positive tweet about the former Prime Minister’s recent plea for progressives to resist Brexit. Nationalist orthodoxy has it that Blair was toxic because he shifted his party to the centre – and they were making that point long before Iraq – but Scotland, the UK and indeed the world are not as they were in the Blairite pomp of the early 21st century.

And the answer is self-evidently not Jeremy Corbyn, or even an alliance with the SNP at the next UK election. Even the whiff of such a coalition sank Ed Miliband last time round, yet the inescapable reality for UK Labour is that it has no hope of regaining power at Westminster without a significant recovery north of the border. But as yesterday’s lacklustre speech demonstrated for the umpteenth time, it’s clearer than ever that an ageing revolutionary from Islington North isn’t the person to deliver it.

There is, it seems, an appreciation among reflective Scottish Labourites that, especially after their recent abortive attempt to push the debate beyond the constitution, hunkering down and awaiting events will be a big part of the recovery process. Over the weekend several different trainee programmes concerning future leadership and strategy emerged, an indication that the party realises they’re in this for the long haul.

Locally, meanwhile, there’s scope for individual Labour MSPs to make a difference. Neil Bibby’s spirited campaign against the closure of the sick kids’ ward at Paisley’s Royal Alexandra Hospital, for example, has probably gotten more political traction than anything that happened in Perth over the weekend. His colleagues would do well to study the ancient art of constituency-based guerrilla warfare.

Otherwise, as I say, they’ll just have to be patient. “Now”, said Jeremy Corbyn in his conference speech, “is not the time to retreat, to run away or to give up.” He was of course correct, but now is certainly the time for the Scottish Labour Party to learn some lessons from the Scottish Tory Party’s long hard slog back to electoral relevancy.