You do not have to be a masochist to be a Liberal Democrat, but it must help. When they first entered government, the more level-headed among them anticipated that there would be a price to pay for the transition from party of protest into party of power, but few of them, back in May 2010, realised that the pain would be so severe and so prolonged. At nearly every electoral test of this parliament, they have been relentlessly hammered. Even the most heroically optimistic in their ranks do not expect anything other than another pulverising when Britain goes to the polls for the Euro and council elections in less than a fortnight's time. With masterful understatement, one senior Lib Dem says: "It is not going to be pretty."

The fate of Nick Clegg's party has been a rather neglected aspect of the May elections. A lot of attention is being devoted to the Ukip surge and the challenge to the mainstream parties posed by the Farageiste frenzy. There has been a mountain of speculation about what elements of the Tory party might try to do to David Cameron in the highly likely event that the Conservatives come third in a nationwide election for the first time in many decades. Over in the red corner, the Labour high command is twitchy that an underwhelming performance by the principal party of opposition in the last test before the general election will be the trigger for a renewed bout of introspection and anxiety about the party's prospects come May 2015. None of the main parties at Westminster have headline polling positions that they can be comfortable with. There will be difficult questions facing both David Cameron and Ed Miliband on election night – or, rather, nights since the agony of result-analysing and excuse-mongering is prolonged because the results of the Euro contest come in 48 hours after those from the locals.

The least enviable spot will be that occupied by whichever Lib Dem is pushed in front of the cameras to try to explain what has happened to his party. Unless all the polls and expert forecasts are getting it wrong, they will again be the starkest losers. In the battle for council seats, there will be another slaughter of their once proud base in local government. Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, the psephologists at Plymouth University, project the cull of a further 340 Lib Dem councillors. That would be going on for half of the seats they are trying to defend and more than double the losses expected to be suffered by their Conservative coalition partners.

In the Euro elections, the pollsters have the number of people intending to vote Lib Dem at 7 to 8%. According to a recent survey, that is less than half the number of Britons who would willingly have sex with a robot. What that means in terms of seats is tricky to call since the votes are allocated proportionally and the movement of small amounts of support can make the difference between losing and clinging on. The forecasts are bleak. They range from the Lib Dems holding a mere five MEPs at the most optimistic end of the scale to a total wipeout which would leave not a single Lib Dem to represent the party in the European Parliament. For the most pro-European party, which has tried to make a big selling point of its pro-Europeanism in these elections, that would be devastating.

In the dire position faced by the Lib Dems just 12 months out from a general election, the expected response of a party would be to hand the traditional glass of whisky and pearl-handled revolver to its leader. The Lib Dems can be ruthless at regicide. Just ask Charles Kennedy or Menzies Campbell.

Yet Mr Clegg has so far survived circumstances which would usually be the death of a leader. One of his protections was that they all signed up to coalition. It was approved three times over: at a meeting of his MPs and peers, with a vote of his party's ruling body, and at a special conference in Birmingham to approve the deal struck with the Conservatives. They all dipped their hands in the blood.

He's also been insulated from regicide by his parliamentary colleagues. It may be miserable being a Lib Dem facing the electorate on the doorstep, but it has been quite a ball for Lib Dems at Westminster. Most of their MPs have enjoyed being in government after all those decades of never getting a sniff of power, and, for the most part, they are still relishing it. There remains a residual respect for Mr Clegg as the man who made that possible.

MPs, who would be the crucial actors in any attempt to defenestrate their leader, have cleaved to the idea that many of their number will be saved by incumbency. Whatever the headline poll figures say, they will be more resilient in the places where they are dug in. That was why the win in last year's Eastleigh byelection was so crucial to Mr Clegg's survival. A few hundred votes the other way, and he might be toast already. His MPs will be examining the results of these Euro and local contests to assess their prospects of hanging on in 12 months' time.

My hunch is that more Lib Dem MPs will survive than is currently suggested by their national poll ratings, but there's no escaping just how awful things look for them. What's worse is that they have adopted a variety of tactics and strategies to improve the party's standing and none of it has worked. Nick Clegg tried The Apology by confessing it was a mistake to make the promise on tuition fees that was subsequently broken. When spoofsters set it to music, that briefly registered on the pop charts, but it did nothing for the Lib Dems on the polling charts. His team have tried putting the leader about a lot with monthly press conferences and a weekly show on LBC. He comes over as engaged, thoughtful and reasonable, but it has made no discernible difference whatsoever to the fortunes of his party.

The Lib Dems have attempted to claim credit for the recovery and for some of the more popular things done by the coalition. Yet voters are unwilling to be impressed and there is constant competition from the Conservatives in those areas. They have gone for a strategy of increasingly aggressive differentiation from the Tories. Just in the past few days, we've had more manifestations of that with the row between the coalition parties over knife crime and an escalation of the naked warfare between the Lib Dem leader and Michael Gove. That doesn't seem to be having any effect either.

In the postmortem of these contests, it is inevitable that questions will be asked about the wisdom of Mr Clegg's decision to challenge Nigel Farage to TV debates. It was a high-risk move born of desperation, but I could understand his reasoning. The hope was that it would raise the Lib Dems' profile and garner some extra support by projecting themselves as the one unambiguously pro-European party with the guts to stand up to Ukip. That was the theory. The hard truth for Lib Dems, which some of the Clegg team will privately acknowledge, is that the debates went badly for their leader and the effect was counter-productive. The post-debate polls awarded victory to the Ukip leader by margins that exceeded the Lib Dems' fears. It was Nigel Farage who drew most benefit from the additional exposure.

In his time of trial, Nick Clegg shouldn't look to David Cameron to help him. Earlier in this parliament, the prime minister had an interest in preserving the Lib Dem leader; anything that threatened to collapse the coalition was scary to the Tory leadership. But now that the economy is recovering, a premature end to the coalition, even if it meant an earlier than expected general election, no longer holds such terrors for the Tories. If there were a period of minority Conservative government, many of them would positively welcome that. There are some Tory strategists who think the fall of Mr Clegg would serve their electoral interests. Says one: "One of the best things that could happen for the Conservative party is for Clegg to be knifed." His replacement as leader by a Lib Dem who might have more appeal to leftish voters would, they calculate, leach support from Labour.

For that reason, I'd assumed that, whatever they said about Mr Clegg in public, it was Labour's secret desire for him to lead his party into the next election. I'm not quite so sure after Labour's clunking Clegg-bashing party political broadcast. Perhaps going for him in such a crude way betrayed a Labour anxiety that some of the Lib Dem voters who have switched to Labour might go back. Perhaps they now really want to kill him.

In the end, it is Lib Dems who will have Nick Clegg's life in their hands. For four torrid years, they have displayed a remarkable resilience, an astonishing discipline and an incredible resistance to despair. He is not a religious man, but Nick Clegg is surely praying that his party isn't about to finally snap.