Toby Neal: Quite a kicking for the prostrate Prime Minister

What a kicking. Right where it hurts too. Ouch.

The only people who liked him were the voting public, which can get you a long way in a democracy.

After the devastating North Shropshire result, that USP has gone. And the Tory bigwigs will be asking: What's Boris for?

It wasn't even a real shock, as the bookies had the Lib Dems as odds-on favourites.

Westminster hates him. The Tory high-ups hate him. Labour hates him. The London-based media hates him and considers him a Trumpian aberration which must be corrected.

The Tory grass roots elected him in 2019 without realising they would end up with a high-tax, high-spend Eton-educated Commie and green warrior.

You could employ an army of experts for a million years to try to make sense of the by-election figures. You might as well rely on a drunken monkey in a hammock.

Because the only experts in explaining why North Shropshire voters voted the way they did are the North Shropshire voters who voted the way they did.

The consensus appears to be that an angry public, fed up with sleaze and Johnsonian shenanigans, has lost whatever faith and confidence they had had in Boris which led them to vote for him in the first place. But post-result interviews with some of those who voted points to that having been one important factor among a cocktail of factors, including local issues.

There's been a lot of talk about the public losing trust in politicians, but one consequence of this sensational defeat is that Tory politicians just can't trust the voters any more – not even in a seat as bombproof as North Shropshire.

Whatever the mainstream media might tell you about it being in Tory hands for 200 years, in a clever clogs way I shall point out that it had a Liberal MP from 1904 to 1906. His name was Allan Bright, although that's not important right now.

Losing North Shropshire is a remarkable achievement. A Brexit-supporting constituency has fallen to the Brexit-hating Lib Dems who in recent general elections have been behind Labour.

Their candidate Helen Morgan (and congratulations to her, by the way) has come from nowhere to win handsomely.

There are some things Boris Johnson and the jittery Tories will grimly hang on to. He has of late looked pale and embattled, but the Parliamentary Christmas break will give him some recovery time – unless he is caught throwing a party of course.

He still has a massive Commons majority to fall back on.

Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Devey calls it a "watershed moment." But we've heard that sort of thing before. Time and time again by-election watersheds have been washed away at general election time.

It was a poor result for Labour.

So while it might be satisfying gleefully to join the queue to give a prostrate Prime Minister a kicking, don't write him off just yet – he might get up again.

And if he is incapable of raising his game, he should at least try to rise from the mire which so often seems his natural habitat.

A bit of revisionist history is doing the rounds that has it that the 1970s was the greatest decade.

They say that if you remember the 1960s, you can't have been there. But if you think the 1970s was the greatest decade you must have still been stoned from the 1960s, or never driven a Morris Marina, and certainly you will not be from Northern Ireland.

That's for adults. For children, what you can say about the 1970s is that it was a better time than for the children of today who are the fattest and most unhappy childhood generation, as they would have said in the 1970s but we are all enlightened now and don't use such outdated terms, and instead use the terms obese and dealing with mental health issues, although doing so doesn't make them any the less fat and unhappy.

They don't get much fresh air, being enslaved by malign technological devices which are agents of inescapable bullying, abuse, and misery, and which secretly track their every move and every habit.

Yes, today's children are severely deprived, and for health and safety reasons cannot even be given clackers as Christmas gifts to cheer them up.