This unnecessary election has reduced the Liberal Democrats to a party without a purpose

When you get down to this sort of representation, quality is more important than quantity. The obvious loss is Nick Clegg, meeting his nemesis at last after the tuition fees affair

Sir Vince Cable is making a return to Parliament, after winning back his seat in Twickenham for the Liberal Democrats (Rex)

It is a strange world where a dozen seats can be regarded as some sort of deliverance – but, of course, that is exactly where the Liberal Democrats have wound up. It is a mild advance on the 2015 disaster, and a very mixed one indeed.

When you get down to this sort of representation, quality is more important than quantity. The obvious loss is Nick Clegg, meeting his nemesis at last after the tuition fees affair. The students in Sheffield Hallam, this time registered at the right address, managed to get to the polling stations in time.

The positive side of the ledger comprises the return of Sir Vince Cable, Jo Swinson and Ed Davey, plus the survival of Norman Lamb and – only just – party leader Tim Farron himself. It will now fall to Cable to fulfil the job of leader of the Anti-Brexit Party in Parliament – where Remainers actually constitute an easy majority, whatever their party labels. In the Lords, perhaps, Clegg could play a prominent role in delivering a second referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal negotiated with the EU. A more consensual Brexit now seems inevitable.

Yet the Lib Dems failed in so many ways to capitalise on the bruised 48 per cent of “left behind” Remainers. Outside the posh London suburbs and places such as Bath, they have been almost driven out of England, and pushed further to the Scottish fringe. There is little sign that they are anywhere near re-establishing in the rest of the Celtic fringe, especially the West Country.

Talk about a progressive alliance and the realignment of the centre left seems misplaced because the country has polarised and progressives have shifted to the left. There’s not much point in creating a grouping that would just get squeezed under this return to two party politics.

Jeremy Corbyn is consolidating the progressives, and even the Remainers, himself even though he personally remains radical and Eurosceptic. He has found a way to mobilise people in a way that had been entirely unexpected, and his statist agenda is popular.

The Lib Dems have survived again. They are political cockroaches, stubbornly surviving the nuclear attack under which they are continually placed by the the first-past-the-post electoral system. And they’ve been through worse: the 1950s; 1989.

Today, however, the Liberal Democrats do look like a party without a purpose.