Prime Minister Rishi Sunak leaves the Conservative Party headquarters in central London

Not even so glorious a diversion as the Coronation could spare the Conservatives the realisation that last Thursday’s local elections in England were a miserable affair for the party. Inevitably, leaders seek to put the best gloss possible on the outcome; but Rishi Sunak struggled to find much that was redeemable.

Tory predictions of 1,000 losses were seen as deliberately pessimistic in order to allow anything in three figures to be hailed as a reasonable result. In the event it was even worse than forecast, with 1,061 councillors losing their seats while the Conservatives lost control of almost 50 local authorities.

More worrying for the Tories was that they are undergoing the same squeeze that led to their catastrophic election defeat in 1997. In the Midlands and North, Labour was performing well, gaining 536 councillors and 22 councils. But in the South it was the Liberal Democrats who fared best, gaining 12 councils including Windsor and Maidenhead and Stratford-on-Avon.

It is true that Labour cannot guarantee an overall parliamentary majority based on last Thursday’s results, with the SNP’s collapse in Scotland looking more important every day. But what does now look certain is that the Tories will lose the 40 seats to deny them a majority.

Indications that the Opposition is forging formal and informal pacts to encourage tactical voting to oust the Conservatives should deeply worry party managers. Mr Sunak desperately needs to shore up his southern base against the Lib Dems, yet a great deal of political capital has been invested in holding on to the so-called Red Wall won by Boris Johnson in 2019. Thursday’s results indicate that many of these will revert to Labour now that the twin issues of Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn no longer feature in voter calculations.

The Government has somehow failed even to get the credit for directing billions of pounds in state help to households to cover energy costs and mitigate the cost of living increase. They continue to be assailed on these matters despite helping much of the country out of difficulties.

Of course, as Iain Duncan Smith, the former party leader, points out, bad local results do not necessarily presage defeat in a general election. But the signs are ominous.

The complaint most heard from defeated councillors was that no one knew what the Tories stand for any longer. Mr Sunak’s five self-defined, and oft-repeated, pledges do not constitute a narrative that can be sold to the electorate. He needs to come up with one soon.