If the nation lasts for a thousand years, people will still say Brexit was not our finest hour

Sunlit uplands. That is supposedly where Brexit will lead us, the phrase having been nicked – very deliberately – from Winston Churchill’s "finest hour" speech of 1940. As things stand, however, even the foothills of a golden future seem distant, and shrouded in fog.

Politics in the UK has been primarily characterised by division for the last three and a half years. To an extent, that is the nature of a political ecosystem built primarily around just two major parties, each of which is partly defined by its opposition to the other.

Yet it is not so very long ago that the possibility of such a chasmic gap developing in the political and social fabric of this country seemed incomprehensible.

Back in 1997, I was – by a week – too young to vote. Yet such was the sense of an old guard finally changing that I felt as invested in the general election as anyone who had actually cast their ballot.

With a group of friends, I watched the results unfold in joyful disbelief. We were a bunch of middle-class teenage liberals, all to a greater or lesser extent having grown up in politically-minded, left-leaning families. None of us were activists; but each of us wanted to see the end of Conservative governments, which was all we had known. Like so many, we were won over by Tony Blair’s charisma and his offer of a third way, a better way.

In some ways, Labour’s landslide feels even more remarkable now than it did then. A majority of 179 – had even the most fervent Blairite imagined such a victory?

The next day, we travelled together to our sixth-form college in Cambridge, crammed into a couple of motors that were almost as old as we were. Parking in side streets we walked to school under clear skies, basking in the kind of glorious May morning that would make you feel happy in almost any circumstances. The positive mood was almost tangible – people smiled as we passed by; one or two even said "good morning!". It was akin to being at a festival.

Youth and friendship played a part I’m sure – and it’s easy to look back at moments like these through rose-tinted specs – but rarely have I felt the pure elation I did on that short walk along a busy Cambridge road. The world, we believed, was our oyster and in Blair, there was a man in No 10 who had (or so it felt to those who had willed his victory) brought unity and optimism to the nation.

Nearly two decades later and it is hard to fathom how we have ended up where we are: 9/11, the Iraq War, Blair’s caution on the economy, the Blair/Brown fall-out, a global recession, a failure by David Cameron to reconcile Tory splits over Europe within his own brand of centrism, the destruction of the Lib Dems, austerity and the rise of fake news and populism. It’s quite a litany.

Many will say that the great new dawn of 1997, Cool Britannia and all, was never anything more than a chimera. I’m not so sure. The urge to learn lessons from history can very easily turn into a fixation with finding the root of all problems in the events of the past.

No, my fear is not that those confident few years which closed the last century were an illusion but that they were the clearest – if brief – glimpse of sunlit uplands that we will have for a very long time.

As for Brexit, all we can see is a fantasy, heralded disingenuously on the floor of the House of Commons. And if Britain lasts for a thousand years, people will still say “this was not their finest hour”.