The much heralded Liberal Democrat “fightback” is starting to look more like a dead cat bounce. The indications are that they may even go backwards on their tally of local councillors. These seats were last contested when Lib Dem popularity was plummeting after a few years of being in coalition with the Conservatives, so a failure to chalk up meaningful gains bodes ill for the party’s prospects on June 8.

What must be bewildering for the Liberal Democrats is how, in the changed political climate since 2015, they have failed to effortlessly zoom upwards. One might have thought that with Theresa May harvesting Ukip votes and the Labour Party leaping, not merely lurching, to the hard left, that the going would be easy. Even just by sitting back and doing nothing, the Liberal Democrats might well have expected to see their vote share return to the high teens or low twenties as moderate Labour voters and Remain-inclined Tories flocked to their banner.

The prevailing media narrative has been that this is happening or surely will happen by polling day. But the actual evidence for such a proposition is vanishingly thin. Some impressive by-election results notwithstanding, LibDem poll ratings remain barely above their disastrous 2015 total of 8 per cent.

Although the Liberal Democrats have a new leader and a new message, the central problem they face is in very many ways the same. Their key proposition is only going to resonate with a remarkably small proportion of the electorate. At the last election, the appeal was to vote for “moderation”. One former Liberal MP sarcastically summed up the party’s key message to me thus: “The Tories want to drive the country ten miles to the right. Labour want to drive the country ten miles to the left. We don’t care what direction we travel in, but we are determined to travel no more than five miles.”