It’s not easy being a Liberal Democrat at the moment.

They’ve lost their only West Midlands MEP, Phil Bennion.

In fact, the party only has one MEP left, in the South East – and even here they came fifth, behind UKIP, the Conservatives, Labour and the Greens.

Local elections were no better. In Solihull they were overtaken by the Greens, who gained five wards to become the second largest party on the council (behind the Conservatives) while the Lib Dems lost four seats.

This matters because the Solihull Parliamentary constituency is a highly marginal Lib Dem-held seat where sitting MP Lorely Burt faces a very difficult fight to stay on. To add insult to injury, some of the leading figures in the local Green party are defectors from the Lib Dems.

It’s widely assumed, and this seems reasonable, that voters are punishing the Liberal Democrats for unpopular decisions taken by the Coalition government of which they are part.

But what makes it all so unfair is that the Conservative Party seems to be relatively unscathed.

In Birmingham, for example, Liberal Democrats won 14 per cent of the vote in the local elections (beating UKIP, which did not do brilliantly in Birmingham’s local elections).

This was ten points lower than they achieved in the general election in 2010.

Of course, there are all sorts of reasons why people may vote differently in a general election and a mid-term local election, but there is still a striking contrast with the Tories – who gained 24 per cent of the vote in Birmingham this time, down by just four per cent compared to 2010.

In a similar vein, national opinion polls recently have put the Tory share of the vote at around 33 per cent, not that far down on their general election showing of 36 per cent.

The Liberal Democrats, however, have the support of around 13 per cent of voters, according to the same polls, a ten per cent fall compared to the 23 per cent they got in the 2010 general election.

Traditionally, support for the Lib Dems has picked up as we get closer to an election, perhaps because the broadcasters stop ignoring them and start giving them equal air time (or close to it) with the other parties.

But I don’t think we can assume the same will happen this time around. The Liberal Democrats are already in the news and can’t expect the same sort of election bounce.

That’s not to say their support won’t go up. Many Lib Dem MPs hope that the public will eventually choose to reward them for doing the right thing - for going into coalition with the Conservatives when the country needed a stable government and we had, after all, voted for a hung Parliament.

They also argue that they curbed some of the Tories’ worst excesses, as they see it, and introduced some progressive measures such as extra funding for school pupils from poorer families, and free school meals for every child in reception year and years one and two.

Others are considering more drastic actions. As we report, Birmingham’s Liberal Democrat MP, John Hemming, is to ask party activists whether they think Nick Clegg should be forced out as party leader.

But the Liberal Democrats had no choice other than to join the Coalition, and they’d have to do the same again in similar circumstances.

For decades, the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors, the Liberal Party, have called for a change in Britain’s voting system. They want a system of proportional representation, so that the number of MPs each party receives more accurately reflects the number of votes they received.

This would, of course, lead to more hung Parliaments, as it is very unlikely any party would get a majority of the votes.

Critics argue that hung Parliaments lead to weak and unstable governments.

They also claim that while proportional representation may appear democratic, it would actually mean that the question of who gets to be Prime Minister and run the country is decided by politicians making deals in private – not at the general election.

Lib Dems reject these arguments, of course. But that means that they have to make coalition government work.

When they agreed to work with the Tories, they had to prove that coalition meant strong and stable government and not one party constantly undermining the other.

They also had to prove that, as a party, they could work with either the Tories or Labour. If the role of the Lib Dems is simply to give us a permanent Labour government – even when more voters back the Conservatives, as they did in 2010 – then they may as well just disband and join the Labour Party.

Mr Clegg made the only choice he could when he went into coalition with the Tories, a decision that was backed of course by a special party conference in Birmingham following the general election.

It’s not clear just how great a price his party will end up paying. But some things can hurt even though they were the right thing to do.