There is not enough gloss on shelves of B&Q to paint over how bad last night’s by-elections were for the Tories.
The Conservatives had long been resigned to losing Wakefield but they had hoped to hold off the Lib Dem surge in Tiverton & Honiton.
In the end they lost both seats by such a crushing margin the party chairman Oliver Dowden chose to quit rather than try to explain away the double disaster on this morning’s media round.
Before the results were announced Boris Johnson had discounted the suggestion they could have any bearing on his time in Downing Street.
It would be “crazy” for him to resign, he told reporters accompanying him to the Commonwealth summit.
The Prime Minister’s view on sanity may well be different to that of Tory MPs who will have noted there are 291 seats with smaller majorities than Tiverton & Honiton.
A year ago Johnson was able to brush aside the Chesham & Amersham by-election defeat at the hands of the Lib Dems because he could point to the result in Hartlepool as evidence of his enduring appeal.
This morning’s results suggest that Johnson’s brand of Conservatism has fallen out of favour with Red Wall voters and the traditional shires.
The coalition of convenience he botched together off the back of Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn’s unpopularity is proving to be dangerously rickety.
What should most alarm the Tories is that they played every populist card in their pack from Rwandan detention flights to reigniting the Brexit wars to union bashing without any noticeable impact on the voters in two Leave-voting seats.
These by-election results partly reflect the disapproval of Johnson’s partying and lying but they are much more a reflection of the public frustration over the state of the economy and the decaying public services.
In Devon the main issues were the lack of NHS dentistry and the poor condition of the local secondary school.
Tory MPs looking to topple Johnson will be ruing the fact that the vote of confidence was called before the by-election results as under the current rules another vote cannot be held for 12 months.
This does not mean he is necessarily safe.
In his gnomic resignation letter Dowden pointedly omitted any praise for the Prime Minister and appeared to urged his colleagues to follow his lead by declaring “we cannot carry on with business as usual.”
The timing could not be worse for Johnson who will be out of the country for seven days as attends the Commonwealth, G7 and Nato summits.
An absent PM will find it harder to steel the spines of wavering colleagues who now fear the party is sleepwalking towards a general election rout.
He was able to survive the vote of no confidence because he convinced enough MPs that he was still a draw at the ballot box.
What does he say to them now?
