When I started writing seriously about Brexit, I said, in the best case scenario, that very little would change in the short-term. My worst case scenario was far more pessimistic. Everyone was hoping for their day of vindication but Covid and Ukraine have managed to scramble everything to such a degree that it’s next to impossible to weigh any single influence on where we are today.

Trade hasn’t quite imploded, but doing business with the EU is much harder and agriculture is not having an easy time of it thanks to Johnson’s dog’s dinner of a trade deal. Fishing is in a similar mess. There is no free trade bonanza nor is a there bonfire of regulations to speak of. The most we can say of Brexit, for the moment, is that it hasn’t been nearly as bad as it could have been given all the circumstances.

But then Brexit is very far from resolved. We have yet to implement checks on incoming goods, and it would appear the British government is incapable of managing any kind of border for goods or people. EU goods freely enter the UK, including counterfeit goods and contraband, while outgoing goods face delays – exacerbated by labour disputes at the ports and more general lack of cooperation from the French.

We’ve broken up frictionless trade in order to diverge, but as yet the government has no clue where it can sensibly diverge or where it would even be worth the bother. Just because we can diverge doesn’t mean we should – but while the Tories dither on what to do about trade policy, British businesses gradually see their European customer bases peeling away.

Since our departure, though, most of the Brexit discourse has centred on the dysfunctional Northern Ireland Protocol which now means our relationship with the EU is bogged down in a diplomatic quagmire. Meanwhile, the stale old Brexit divisions are still there, and Brexit’s political casualties are still haunting Twitter looking to blame everything that’s happened since 2019 on Brexit. The Brexit debate is now a leper colony and anyone sane steers well clear of it. There is nothing new to say.

In any case, Britain has bigger problems. Rampant inflation caused by energy insecurity and fuel spikes has eclipsed any Brexit fallout, and the Ukraine war is far more likely to dominate European economies and politics for the foreseeable future. Brexit will fade in relevance and its transformative potential will evaporate. The Tories never did quite know what to do with Brexit and unless there’s a sea change in British politics, we’re unlikely to see politicians with the imagination and talent to do anything with it.

At the very least one hoped that Brexit would be the shock to the system our political class needed but its effects were short-lived. The supposedly “most right wing government of all time” very rapidly wobbled back to its comfortable legacy Blairism as though Brexit never happened. Everything since has been red meat gesture politics that doesn’t translate into anything meaningful. We certainly can’t say the establishment got the message on immigration. If I’d been in a coma for the last few years I would be hard pressed to say that anything had changed – and certainly not for the better.

Ultimately if Britain is going to get fixed then it needs something bigger an more profound even than Brexit. Brexit could have been a catalyst but when it’s in the hands of empty vessels like Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tories will continue to miss the point of the entire exercise and tinker around the edges. A free port in Hartlepool isn’t going to reignite the fires of British enterprise.

Brexit, though, is not the defining policy of this administration. Net Zero is. And it tells us more about contemporary toryism than Brexit. It’s ultimately a quasi-socialist stimulus package because the Tories don’t even believe in their own core ideologies. They’ve reached for Net Zero because when it comes to big reform ideas, the cupboard is bare. There’s no thinking going on as to how to reform our “democracy” because from their point of view, it’s working exactly as intended.

In terms of forging a role for Britain, Boris Johnson believes fire-hosing cash and heavy weapons at Ukraine represents Britain standing up for democratic values and leading in Europe, despite the fact that Ukraine is a kleptocratic basketcase closer to Russian values than the permissive liberalism of the modern Tory party. Ukraine is just a aeons old border spat which temporarily suits Britain’s PR purposes.

Britain may have left the EU but our ruling establishment never departed from the technocratic Brussels mindset and the policy agenda is still devoted to elite concerns such as climate change. The so-called revolt on the right is now dead in the water and so there’s nothing to hold Tory feet to the fire. Our prosperity was already standing on a foundation of sand, with private savings and pensions in terminal decline, but the tax burden of Net Zero, coupled with energy shocks may just be enough to push us over the edge, leaving the electorate with nowhere to go.

Were the Tories bold enough to grasp Brexit with both hands, they’d be looking at revitalising domestic fishing and food production, but also dumping the failed energy and climate policies of the EU which increased fossil fuel dependency.

Britain’s bounceback is contingent on cheap energy yet the Tories are doing all the can to make matters worse while remaining in lockstep with the EU. They could do no worse than bet on the failure of the EU’s EV revolution and position the UK to advance more efficient ICE designs and micro nuclear technology. But no, the Tories can only think in terms of windmills and solar panels. Somebody may make good of Brexit, but it won’t be Boris Johnson, and it won’t be soon – and not until we’re all a lot poorer.