“Today on Brexit Day,” began Boris Johnson, “as we look back at that vaccine rollout…” But I’d already stopped listening, lost in the thought that once again Brexit Day had crept up on me and I hadn’t done any of my shopping. It was too late to send my Brexit Day cards, too late to order a Turkey (which is joining the EU), too late to get along to church for the Brexit morning service, full of dads wearing Brexit jumpers and children proudly showing off the trade deals they’d found in their Brexit stockings.

Johnson was speaking in a video on his Twitter feed. It was 84 seconds long which, at the rate he now charges for speaking, works out north of £800. That’s quite a lot for him to give away for nothing, especially at a time of year when he has to buy Brexit presents for an undetermined number of offspring. But then, Brexit Day is a time for giving.

“Let’s shrug off all this negativity and gloom-mongering that I hear about Brexit,” Johnson went on. “Let’s remember the opportunities that lie ahead.”

We all celebrate Brexit Day in our different ways, of course

There have been suggestions that people are losing sight of the real meaning of Brexit. It’s not that Brexit is getting too commercial. There is, sadly for companies trying to sell things abroad, little danger of that. But it’s hard to escape the sense that Brexit isn’t about the stuff it used to be. When my kids were small, it felt like Brexit was all about big red buses with dodgy statistics painted on the side, and posters promising to stop foreigners from coming here. What does Brexit mean now? Rishi Sunak had put out a Brexit Eve message, talking about Freeports and Solvency II, but it read more like a cry for help than a vision of the future. There are suspicions that Sunak is a cultural Brexiteer rather than a true believer.

As the Brexit faithful worry that their numbers are dwindling, the question is whether they should stick to the old message or adapt to reflect modern lifestyles and attitudes. Too many young people, they fear, find the government’s traditional teachings on Brexit hard to accept.

We all celebrate Brexit Day in our different ways, of course. Good Morning Britain had chosen to mark the moment by inviting Matt Hancock on. Having opposed Brexit and then supported it and then opposed a no deal Brexit before supporting one, Hancock is very much Brexit’s St Paul, if Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus had involved the offer of a Cabinet job.

For some reason GMB had chosen to frame Hancock with other pictures of Hancock behind him. Over his left shoulder was “Stay At Home” Matt Hancock. Just to his right was Matt Hancock side-by-side with Johnson. There’s a limit to the amount of Hancock any of us can handle over our Frosties, and this was Too Much Hancock.

He was there to talk about – oh who knows what? But they asked him, as they always do, about that whole thing where he told everyone they had to not see their loved ones while it turned out that he was having an affair.

Now we Brexit through a glass, darkly

“Well,” he paused, and sighed, and emoted, and sighed. “I’m only human.” He gave the smug smile of a man who is not only human but also apparently irresistible to the ladies. We’re living in Hancock’s mid-life crisis. He’s a man who’s losing his hair but has got together with the girl he fancied at university. It wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that he released the video of his office smooch himself, just so that the world could know that Matt was finally with Gina.

“This is what I asked for forgiveness in the jungle for,” he went on, making his appearance on an ITV reality show sound like a 19th Century journey of penitence to find the source of the Nile.

For Hancock and Johnson, Brexit, which was once about farmers and fishermen and the NHS, now turns out to always have been about vaccines. It’s a rewriting of the original story as comprehensive as Sherlock Holmes explaining that he was only pretending to be dead, but it works for them.

Others have their own ideas. We go finally to Lord Frost, the sage of Brexit. If you want to understand how bad things are for the Conservative Party, just know that Lord Frost is now their leading intellectual. Frost’s view of Brexit makes Schrodinger’s cat look straightforward. To him Brexit is simultaneously a triumph that has liberated the British people from decades of bondage and a disaster that needs to be urgently torn up and renegotiated. It is at once the summit of our nation’s being and something that has yet to be completed.

Some people sneer at Frost but like any great philosopher, he’s wrestling with deep truths that are hard to articulate. The reality is that, like communism, Brexit hasn’t failed because True Brexit has never been tried. Like the Kingdom of Heaven, Brexit is both Now and Not Yet. No one has ever seen Brexit, but Lord Frost has made it known. Now we Brexit through a glass, darkly. One day we shall Brexit face to face.