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

Looking back to the optimistic days after Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, Will Gore wonders how on earth we ended up here

(AFP)

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.