If the results of the 2016 referendum on membership of the EU and of the general election of 2017 are to be effective, two other things will need to be tackled. One is the realisation that national self-determination (in other words, democracy) may not accord with short- and medium-term economic convenience. Freedom and democracy may well have a price (though probably less dire than the promoters of Project Fear would like us to believe). Second, the expert advice of civil servants, though it should be taken seriously, should not always be allowed to trump public opinion. The contemptuous term “populism” is too pejorative, tripping too easily from the tongues of the cognoscenti. The public is capable of serious illusion, but so too are officials. It must not be forgotten that some British civil servants have enjoyed lucrative EU postings while others have taken advantage of rules which too easily allow them to take up highly profitable post-retirement posts in the very areas in which they have previously been involved as public servants.

Perhaps it is not very surprising that elections (especially those conducted on the British removal van model) do not overly appeal to some mandarins. The arrangements devised in the run-up to the 2010 general election by the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service Lord (then Sir Gus) O’Donnell to promote and entrench conventions of coalition government in the form of a controversial “Cabinet Manual” were, as I have argued before in Standpoint, an unnecessary and undesirable innovation dressed up as a résumé of established practice. Effectively it was a civil service power grab intended to substitute European constitutional arrangements for British ones. O’Donnell’s successor Sir Jeremy Hayward apparently planned to follow those arrangements in the event of a hung parliament in 2015. For obvious reasons, talk of hung parliaments is absent from the current election campaign. The danger is that this will permit Sir Jeremy to maintain the “Cabinet Manual” and to keep it in reserve for future elections.

This brings me back to the party headquarters formerly in Smith Square. The Labour Party has changed relatively little, though what was Transport House is now occupied by the Local Government Association, a government-funded lobbying organisation. The TGWU, in its current form of Unite, has largely determined the Labour leadership. As for the Conservatives, the old Smith Square HQ is now the London office of the European Commission and is funded in considerable part by UK taxpayers through contributions to the EU. Will Brussels’s negotiators demand further payment for its repatriation?

So will votes on June 8 have any lasting effects? The takeover of Labour by the Corbynites and the stakes in the forthcoming negotiations on exiting the EU both suggest that the election could be the most important since 1979 and, before that, 1945. That will depend as much on what happens afterwards as on polling day itself.