Please do stop using the word Brexit; that fractious period in our politics is now past, government officials are invited to believe. Instead, recently issued Whitehall guidelines instruct civil servants to use terminology such as “before 31 December 2020” – when Britain formally exited Europe’s single market – and “after 1 January 2021”, to describe our historic break with Brussels.

To the extent that there is any logic at all in this otherwise unfathomably stupid directive, I suppose it is intended to convey the impression that Brexit is now essentially over, done and dusted, delivered as instructed. Time to move on, nothing to see here, finito.

Many of those who campaigned for Brexit might in some sense agree with the underlying message, if not its purpose. For a full year has now passed since Britain freed itself from the clutches of EU law and instruction, and so far there is little, if anything, of much significance to show for it, beyond a new immigration regime, which has already been found wanting by Brexit-supporting business leaders. It is almost as if Brexit never happened, for all the difference it seems to have made.

Continuity, rather than rupture, is the overwhelming impression. We may no longer be capture to the EU machine, but on everything from labour market and environmental policy, competition rules to financial regulation, we seem still very much to be in its orbit. Even new rules on crop gene editing seem to have been designed to appease the risk-averse mindset of Brussels.

In some respects, the relative lack of divergence might seem forgivable. Ministers have had their hands more than full dealing with the pandemic; there’s been little bandwidth for anything else. The low tax, smaller state, deregulatory ambitions of some Brexiteers, moreover, have been badly knocked off course by the humongous public spending and extraordinary government interventions deemed necessary to counter Covid.

But as Lord Frost, the Government’s now former European chief negotiator, intimated in a recent Centre for Policy Studies speech, there is not a lot of point in “taking back control” if you then do nothing with it and instead end up hugging the old European acquis communautaire.

Brexit has in some ways proved a surprisingly smooth and undisruptive process. The more alarmist “Remainer” predictions failed to materialise; there were no long tailbacks at ports, no empty supermarket shelves and no mass insolvency or panic in the financial markets. Even so, a year after the event, the overriding impression is of quite a bit of downside for as yet very little discernible gain.

Trade with Europe has weakened markedly, particularly in high value added services, while diplomatic relations with near neighbours and major allies have deteriorated close to breaking point. Ongoing wrangling over the Northern Ireland Protocol has been compounded by rows with the French over fishing rights and migrant boats. Not since Waterloo have relations with France been as bad as they are now, Sylvie Bermann, former French ambassador to the UK, recently observed. She was only half joking.

There is, meanwhile, no chance of a trade deal with the US as long as the present incumbent remains in the White House. In a breathtakingly naive speech shortly before Christmas, Penny Mordaunt, minister for trade policy, called on the US to choose sides between the UK and the EU, as if once more on the brink of war with a delinquent Continent. The answer was unambiguous; Biden chose Brussels. Trump-era tariffs on European steel and aluminium have been lifted for EU member states, but not for Britain. Nor is there any likelihood of it until the UK bends its knee to Europe on the Northern Ireland Protocol.

Brexit was of course always bound to be a long game that would take time to deliver meaningful gains. Boris Johnson thinks of it as a minimum 10-year project; the idea that the nation would magically be transformed overnight into some kind of economic and geopolitical dynamo by the mere act of divorce from Europe was always for the birds. The whole purpose of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement was to prevent undue economic damage by providing a degree of continuity, so as to protect key sectors of the economy from the full force of the separation.

Yet in seeking to placate those vested interests most heavily bought into European markets – be they farming lobbies, Big Business, car or aerospace industries – Johnson has necessarily heavily compromised his room for manoeuvre and risks pleasing no one.

Those trade deals the Government has managed to sign that are not simply copy and paste exercises from existing EU free trade agreements have similarly been heavily watered down to accommodate sectors previously protected by Europe, rendering their economic impact marginal at best.

Remainers see today’s manifestly unsatisfactory settlement – neither in nor fully out of Europe’s embrace – as evidence of the folly of Brexit itself, while hardline Brexiteers increasingly view it as a sellout. Those who saw leaving the EU as a gateway to a more Thatcherite, lower tax, smaller state vision of Tory-governed Britain have been sadly disappointed. With its levelling-up agenda, heavily focused as it is on Brexit-supporting red wall constituencies, Downing Street seems instead to be marching in the opposite direction. Reconciling what was always a very broad and often contradictory coalition of the Leave-voting public is proving extraordinarily difficult.

Nobody would wish for a pandemic, but one consequence of the events of the past two years has been to distract attention from the shortcomings in the Government’s approach to Brexit. Amid the economic ruin of lockdown, any adverse impact from Brexit has seemed scarcely worth thinking about. Covid has also provided a handy excuse for ducking the overarching question: free at last, yet to what purpose?

With a bit of luck, the pandemic will soon be largely behind us, but it will leave a poisonous legacy of dangerously high public indebtedness, rising taxes, elevated inflation and squeezed household incomes. Having taken back control, there’s nowhere to hide. No longer can we blame the “dead hand of Europe” for our failings. Tough though it seemed, delivering Brexit may have been the easy part; the challenge now is to make something of it.