The anguish of austerity cuts may have come late to the leafier Conservative-run councils of England but there is no doubt it has arrived. Reflecting on the eye-watering spending cuts stricken county halls must push through this year and next, the Kent county council leader Paul Carter declared to a Tory conference fringe meeting last week that “no Conservative came into local government to do this”. The room, packed with councillors, exploded into applause, accompanied by booming cries of “hear, hear”.

The meeting pulsed with anger, bewilderment, despair, possibly even regret that the austerity chickens have come home to roost in Tory England. Most councillors there would have accepted town hall belt-tightening eight years ago as a necessary obligation at a time of national economic crisis. Few, I suspect, assumed then that their civic duty almost a decade later would be to shut cherished services and strap local government on to the life-support ventilator.

There was a palpable sense of betrayal. The message from Tory local government to the party hierarchy was: we have delivered your austerity cuts, quietly and efficiently, and what is our reward? A clutch of councils on the verge of financial collapse, demand rocketing for already overstretched services, dismayed local voters, and no end in sight. As one of the party’s rising stars,the West Midlands regional Tory mayor and ex-John Lewis boss, Andy Street, said on the eve of the conference: “The cuts have gone too far.” Central government, they feel, is in denial about how billions of pounds of cuts logged effortlessly on to a Whitehall spreadsheet turn into devastating real-world cuts to Sure Start, libraries and social care and a crumbling public realm. Theresa May pledged to end austerity, but next year’s spending review, dominated by the extra £20bn for the NHS, seemingly offers little respite for councils. Any potential solutions offered by the social care funding green paper are years away.

County Tories hope the imminent council fair funding review will throw them a lifeline by redistributing cash away from metropolitan areas. That must be tempting for ministers: Carter estimates that 76% of Tory MPs represent constituencies covered by county councils. On the other hand, anything that seems to be a convenient bung for failing Tory-run councils, such as Northamptonshire, is not a good look. Nor, in the Brexit era, is switching scarce resources from deprived “left-behind” areas to the likes of wealthy Surrey.

There will not be universal sympathy for the plight of municipal Tories. Compared to their Labour counterparts, Tory-run councils have been relatively insulated from the cuts. Many froze council tax for years, helping to create their own financial mess. They could have done more, earlier, to oppose them. Austerity has been bad for all councils. It’s become a stark humiliation for Tory local government.

• Patrick Butler is the Guardian’s social policy editor