When the anniversary comes, later this month, few will be in the mood to look back. All the political talk will be of the Makerfield byelection, of the future of this government and this prime minister. And yet, it would be wise to reflect on what happened on 23 June 2016 – if only because the choices Keir Starmer and his would-be successors face, indeed the entire political and cultural landscape we now inhabit, are informed or were shaped by that event. We are living in Brexit Britain.

A useful prompt comes from an upcoming two-part BBC series Brexit: A Very British Civil War, made by the master documentarian Norma Percy. Speaking to (nearly) every key player, it brings it all back – the red bus, “take back control”, the pantomime river battle of Nigel Farage v Bob Geldof.

It reminds you of things some may have forgotten, including the extent to which this whole thing came about as a wheeze, a clever tactical ploy, plotted by the careless people who were then running the country. In 2013, David Cameron and George Osborne sought to placate noisy Eurosceptics in their own ranks by promising an in/out referendum after the next election – a pledge they assumed they’d never have to honour because they were sure they’d fail to win an outright majority in parliament, whereupon they would cheerfully trade the promise away as a concession to the Lib Dems.

As if that were not cavalier enough, Britain’s place in Europe became dependent on the soap-opera dynamics of the Notting Hill set: it was all tennis in Regent’s Park and weekends at Chequers, Michael (Gove) letting down Dave and what will Sam (Cameron) think of Boris. Johnson insists he didn’t “give a fuck about being prime minister,” while Osborne begs to differ: “It was nothing to do with the EU, Britain’s place in the world. It was Game of Thrones. That’s what Boris Johnson was playing. And he could see the Iron Throne right there about to be vacated.” This stuff was all-consuming at the time – and........

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