We’re leaving the European Union on 31st January and there is no way to stop it now. Michael Heseltine, who bravely endured the scorn of his former conservative colleagues, has quite understandably thrown in the towel.

European leaders have abandoned us as a lost cause.

“We have been waiting for more than one year to know what Britain wants. Now we have clarity,” the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said at the EU summit on Friday.

ignoring the fact that more of us voted against Bojo the Clown than for him.

Yet the many millions of us who believe in the idea of a united Europe haven’t gone away. For quite a while to come we’re going to be unrepresented on the national stage. There’s no organised group to draw us together and provide leadership right now. The Labour Party will spend the next few years navel gazing and may descend into party civil war. The Liberals, my natural home, are considered toxic by the left because of their role in the coalition government, and a joke by the right because of their role in the coalition government. Even the People’s Vote Campaign, which mysteriously decided to implode the very week the election was called, has decided to “refocus its campaign to concentrate on vital social issues”, whatever that means.

The Clown’s whopping majority on Friday wasn’t that unexpected. Deep down, I think many of us in the Guardian reading metropolitan elite, as the rich boys from Eton like to call us, knew what was coming. It’s not easy to find crumbs of comfort in last week’s result. So, trying to find reasons to be cheerful, here’s my attempt to find some hope for the future.

First, there’s the numbers who voted. Under a more representative voting system, the new House of Commons would look very different. The electoral reform society has produced some nice graphics to illustrate this. First past the post produced the following HoC:

whereas proportional representation would have given us this:

Basically, the Tories would lose about 70 seats and the Liberal Democrats would pick up about 70. Greens, Labour and the Brexit party would each have gained about 10 extra seats. No party would have a majority by itself, reflecting the way the country actually voted.

Of course, no government with a huge FPTP majority is going to kick away the ladder that got it there. But it would be nice to get the debate back on the agenda. (You can sign a petition for this if you like.) Apart from coalition and national governments, not a single government since 1931 has represented a majority of the British people. In most of those elections, the majority of the votes were ignored.

Instead of government by the majority, we get government by the largest minority, and sometimes not even that. Instead of searching for ways to cooperate, it’s a system that encourages the politics of confrontation and leads to the kind of toxic level of debate that has spilled over into the recent Brexit fiasco, where Remainers are branded as traitors and Brexiteers are dismissed as thick.

Sadly, I don’t see much hope of the electoral reform debate being resurrected again any time soon. Still, it’s some comfort to know that those who oppose this government are in the majority.

Next there’s the demographic split. Of course, voting patterns change as people grow older, so there’s no guarantee that the popularity of the EU among younger people will still be there in 20 years time. Nothing in the future is certain apart from this, attitudes and circumstances will be different in decades to come. Things will change and, although I probably won’t live to see it, the idea of a united Europe will finally make it’s way to England and Wales one day.

In the meantime, there’s going to be exactly the same debate over the future trading relationship with the EU as there has been for the past three years. Either we continue to play by the EU’s rule book, or we switch to the USA’s rule book, or we reject both and have free trade with neither. This will be decided wholly by the Conservative Party over the next few years, with the rest of us relegated to being noisy bystanders. It will be interesting to see what the outcome is and who feels betrayed and let down by it.

The battle for what type of Brexit is about to begin and most of us are no longer in the fight.