When the Scottish results of the European Parliament elections began to firm up late on Sunday night, it soon became clear that history was being made.

Ignore Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party because that was a one-off protest vote. Now that Farage is a real threat to the Tories down south, you can expect him and his party to be the target of seriously lethal investigations, even by the tabloids. Farage doesn’t have the clout or chutzpah of his mate Donald Trump to bluff his way out.

No, the real political history in Scottish terms was the astonishingly awful performance of the Labour and Tory parties. Their supporters should read this and weep...

Credit to the BBC’s Brian Taylor who was the first to broadcast just how serious was the situation facing the Conservative and Unionist Party - he said that in terms of the share of the popular vote, the Scottish Tories had their worst performance since 1865.

That sent the rest of us to check the history books, and Taylor could have delivered an even more damning verdict. For with 11.6% of the votes cast, the Scottish Conservatives recorded their WORST ever performance in a national election since percentages of votes cast were first recorded in 1832.

Let’s repeat that - this is the WORST election result in Scottish Tory history, even worse than all their results in the Scottish Parliament elections and their wipeout in the Westminster election of 1997 where they got no seats but did take 17.5% of the popular vote.

Pedants will undoubtedly try to point out that the modern Conservative and Unionist party can’t really be considered the descendant of the old Tory, or Conservative and Liberal Unionist, or Unionist, or National Liberal and Conservative parties (they have had a few name changes over the decades though a Tory is aye a Tory), but the fact is that these latest election results are worse than in the 1865 general election when the Conservatives polled just 14.6% of the vote - and remember, there was no universal suffrage and the voting system was rigged back then.

You have to go forward to 2015 and the Westminster election for the Tories’ next worst Scottish result, but they still gained 14.9% of the vote.

In case anyone from Labour is reading and laughing at the Tories, consider that, if you accept that the Labour Party’s parliamentary activity started with the 1910 Westminster general elections, then these elections are the third worst performance in the Party’s history and by far the worst since the arrival of universal suffrage.

Back in December 1910, Labour gained 3.6% of the popular vote in Scotland, down from 5.1% recorded in the January election in that year. It could be argued that Labour was very much a fledgling party in 2010 so the 9.3% of the popular vote that was gained in these European elections is arguably the worst result in the history of Labour in Scotland.

Now let’s consider another piece of recent history. In the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections, Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats all lost ground to the SNP.

The three parties recorded losses in both the constituency and additional seat votes, with the swings against Labour and the Tories being quite small. Nevertheless all three party leaders - Iain Gray, Annabel Goldie and Tavish Scott - did the decent thing and resigned.

Losing elections, even little regarded ones such as for local authorities and the European Parliament used to be an almost automatic signal that a party leader was failing and there would be calls for his or her head.

It seems that history isn’t going to repeat itself and the example of Gray, Goldie and Scott will not be followed by Ruth Davidson and Richard Leonard.

This is certain of course, because they can both blame dysfunctional leaders in their UK head offices, thus escaping the necessity to face up to their electoral hammerings.

Still, even branch office managers should take the rap when something goes spectacularly wrong on their patch, and if recording the worst elections result in Tory and Labour’s history in Scotland isn’t a resigning offence then what is?

At the very least, making this sort of wrong political history is a massive blot on the records of both Davidson and Leonard, but who else will call them out for their dreadful performances?