There is nothing worse than when the voters stop listening. That is what has happened to Gordon Brown’s government. Whatever ministers said, the voters of Crewe and Nantwich did not want to hear. They had made up their minds to hand David Cameron’s Conservatives a famous victory - its first by-election gain from Labour for 30 years.

Mr Brown’s administration is badly adrift. The bookmakers have shortened the odds still further on a Tory government.Ministers were left with nothing but the familiar claim that this was a mid-term protest vote - against soaring food and fuel prices and uncertain economic prospects. There is something to that. But it was a protest on an epic scale - and a by-election that for the first time in living memory saw the Conservatives as the principal beneficiary of the nation’s discontent.