They poisoned him. They shot him. They stabbed him. They chased him to the frozen river and drowned him. Still he would not die. Not since Rasputin has a politician so defied the weapons of death. But yesterday afternoon the Neva closed for a third time over Charles Kennedy’s head. He had to accept that the Liberal Democrat party was more a party than a democracy. He had tried to take his enemies with him to the country. He wanted to prove he was no Margaret Thatcher, driven from office by a bunch of Westminster oligarchs. Eventually they were too strong for him.

The Liberal Democrats are not a serious national party. They have had no power since the advent of the universal franchise, and have no prospect of it. They are a dustbin party, a middle-ground asylum party, a none-of-the-above party, a wine-and-cheese party, a cheap peerage party, a memorial to Gladstone and Lloyd George party. They are historical jetsam.

The Liberal Democrats represent no great interest. No one becomes a Liberal Democrat MP to rule the country. Though effective in local government, the party is sustained nationally by the conventions and perks of Westminster and by the media’s love of triangulation. The BBC cannot bring itself to hold a debate without a Liberal Democrat present, usually Sir Menzies Campbell.

For decades the one distinctive Liberal policy has been not to replace one of the two big parties but to win electoral reform and thus a centrist “blocking third” in the House of Commons. It has been to exchange too little power for too much. It has sought perpetual minority government, to remove democracy from the polls to the bartering rooms of parliament.

This mercifully it has failed to achieve. I have always thought the party should be honest, disband and divide itself between Labour and Conservative.

Any doubt on this matter will have been quelled last week. Kennedy, the party leader, should have resigned when the extent of his alcoholism and other inadequacies were apparent to all. But his decision to put his job to the mass party was his constitutional right. The reaction of his 61 MP colleagues was pure Trollope.

Eleven senior ones banded together to write a letter of disloyalty, but courage failed when it came to licking the stamp. Then 25 wrote a letter to Vincent Cable. When Kennedy told his enemies to “put up or shut up” they all ran for cover. They buried themselves in their coffee rooms and bars and hoped, by means of grubby gossip and backstairs intrigue, to get journalists to do their dirty work for them. They succeeded.

That a leader may be an alcoholic, have dodgy cronies and dodgier financial backers and be “ineffective in the house” is as may be. The party voted for Kennedy nationally by one member, one vote. Seventy-three thousand members outvote 62 MPs. If Sir Menzies Campbell, Mark Oaten, Simon Hughes or Nicholas Clegg were too gutless to enter the lists against Kennedy in a national poll, they are surely too gutless to lead a national party.

Kennedy hoped he might win a ringing endorsement from the mass membership and thus tell his MPs to get lost. He would certainly have posed them a problem. The business of Commons leadership, of shadow cabinets and frontbench portfolios, is a charade for an opposition with no hope of power.

But if Kennedy had continued as national leader he would have been left roaming the country while his MPs elected someone else to lead them in the Commons. He realised that that would have been intolerable. Parliament has duly won a victory over the populace. It will win another if the MPs stitch up a leadership deal that stops the party now having any real choice.

The past decade saw a golden opportunity for the Liberals to recapture the ground stolen from them by Labour a century ago. That opportunity was blown. The “orange” strategy of so-called economic liberalism, of moving towards the Tories, was madness. It relied on the latter continuing to choose a string of unelectable right-wing leaders, which was bound to end one day.

The Liberal Democrats might win a few rural and suburban seats from the Tories in a good year. But they would win them back. There will always be a Conservative party.

The opportunity lay on the left. From the moment Tony Blair aspired to become Labour leader, he set out to undermine his party’s electoral infrastructure of trade unionists, council tenants and public sector workers. His thesis was that they were a dwindling band and upsetting them would attract the new “middle-class majority”.

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