IT is obviously bad but how bad? That was the question running round the Scottish Labour conference in Perth yesterday as delegates pondered the loss of the Copeland by election to the Tories, the worst result for an official opposition in 35 years. The defeat of Ukip leader Paul Nuttall in Stoke-on-Trent offered some relief, although his campaign self-destructed, and even then Labour only just scraped through.

Indeed, it was arguably the Tories what won it for Labour in Stoke. After Theresa May’s recent visit, Ukip and the Tories ended neck and neck, on 5,233 and 5,154 votes respectively. Had the Tories eased off, even the accident-prone Mr Nuttall might have triumphed. Mrs May can live with one Labour face replacing another at Westminster.

It would have been far harder to handle the Ukip leader getting a Commons platform and spooked Tory MPs badgering her to turn the Brexit talks into all-out war with Brussels. Labour’s win in Stoke is also Mrs May’s.

There was an obvious follow-up question in Perth, too: how much worse can it get? With UK-wide local elections in May, it won’t take long to find out, though the answer isn’t in doubt. Things can get much worse, and they surely will. In Scotland, Labour polled 31 per cent in 2012 and won power in 15 of 32 councils. This year it’s polling half that and is likely to come third behind the Tories on vote share and lose power in most of its authorities, including the capital of its lost empire, Glasgow.

Jeremy Corbyn can’t rescue it. I saw him speak when he stood for election as leader in 2015. The speech was terrible, a random list of things in life he thought were awful, including General Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973. How, I wondered, would any of it appeal to ordinary voters who are understandably more interested in their future than South American history? He didn’t seem interested in getting votes. What kind of party leader doesn’t prioritise votes and hence power and change? A doomed one, clearly.

But the conference faithful needn’t throw themselves into the Tay just yet. Mr Corbyn, who is due in Perth tomorrow, may not be a name to inspire hope but these might: William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard.

The landfill Tory leaders between John Major and David Cameron are a reminder that parties often churn chaotically through a series of duds before the tide turns. Mr Hague was the first modern Tory leader not to become prime minister. IDS lasted barely two years, Mr Howard the same. But then the Tories got a leader in Mr Cameron and an opponent in Gordon Brown whom they could work with.

Politics is a strange mutual support system, in which parties are first concussed and then revived by their opponents. Flatlining parties cannot regenerate in a vacuum. They need friction to prosper, something to bounce off and react to. Take the Scottish Tories. Wiped out in 1997, rescued by devolution, they stalled under the late David McLetchie then declined under Annabel Goldie. Ruth Davidson leads the second party at Holyrood and has approval ratings higher than Nicola Sturgeon’s; because along came an issue, independence, she could oppose and make her own. Alex Salmond and Ms Sturgeon revived the Scottish Tories as surely as they revived the SNP, driving Unionist voters into Ms Davidson’s arms.

So Scottish Labour’s task is to survive in the hope it can thrive in future. It will be a long wait but its opponents will eventually provide an issue, scandal or leader it can define itself against. As former Labour MP Tom Harris noted, a second referendum might even rescue the party. Whether it’s a Yes or No, the SNP will have to stop talking about the constitution and politics will revert to health, education and social justice. Scottish Labour, improbably, isn’t done for yet.