This time last year, more or less, we were picking over election bones. I looked forward with optimism to ‘a strong and elastic coalition’ government where the worst of old-fashioned, small c conservatism and tribal politics would be sidelined by a more consensual style of party leadership and government. Young leaders, including, one had hoped, David Miliband rather than his clumsier younger brother, were going to lead us cheerfully, if uncomfortably, up the rocky road towards a regenerated economy and would finally get to grips with much-needed and perpetually-debated political and institutional reform. I also wrote that, for the first time, the prime minister was younger than me and I felt part of an older generation: a year later, I feel like Methuselah, and my view is inclined to turn ever more backwards than forwards.

Over the last couple of weeks, childhood memories have come rushing to the fore. Nothing bad, you understand, the sort of childhood where detail has been lost in the haze of sunlit gardens, country streams, dogs and ponies that were the mark of privileged but unexceptional early years in the English countryside. There are a series of programmes on the BBC over the next few weeks on hidden English country houses; the first was the medieval manor house that belonged to my mother’s family for 500 years and where I lived as a child.

It is extraordinary watching a television historian describe a chunk of your own history — the house now beautifully restored with period furniture by its current pop star owner but without the rather dull family portraits that one barely noticed on the walls or the swords that hung above the great hall and, still razor sharp, were presented to a museum after an incident when duelling in a distant bedroom suddenly seemed a sensible amusement for a wet afternoon. The extraordinary fabric of the house is the same, ghosts and all. Sir Walter Raleigh is meant to have smoked his first American tobacco when visiting the house, staying in what became my father’s dressing room. I don’t remember the whiff of his pipe, probably too much other Virginia tobacco was smoked in the house in the less-healthy, 1960s days, but there was at least one room where the dog’s hackles rose and my lifelong fear of the dark may have something to do with the gargoyles of monsters eating babies above the front door.

I wander, however, from my point, which concerns both the cavalcades of politicians who lived in that house from the 15th century and those who continued to pass through my parents’ and grandparents’ doors both there and in other houses throughout my youth. What I remember most, and what seems so singularly lacking among our generally younger political leaders today, is the great wind of history that seemed always to enter with the great men of those times; whether privileged patricians like Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home or men of the people like Ted Heath, and certainly the great Labour leaders too. History enveloped their presence and informed their beliefs. In itself that hardly means they all got things right, but they understood their political existence in a much greater context than today’s politicians appear to do, and I cannot but feel that is a good thing. Mrs Thatcher may have been the first to live solely for the present, although she, like Tony Blair more recently, was not above assuming the mantle of Winston Churchill when it came to going to war.

Our current leaders are a highly educated bunch, focused on the job, with none of the long foreign holidays, weekend shootings and hunting, uninterrupted by modern communications of Conservative politicians, in the early post-World-War-II years, but history for them seems to start in 1997. I exaggerate, of course, but the New Labour reinvented politics, or believed that it had. I was not alone in leaping onto that bandwagon but, this time round, I am warier. David Cameron’s “Big Society” seems nothing more than an intellectual revamp of the New Labour dream rooted in this extraordinary belief that what has gone before can be swept to one side and the new, or nominally new, can metamorphose society with little reference to the past. I exaggerate again. For a start, this government has so many economic pieces to pick up before it can move forward that it was always going to be hobbled in its ambitions before it began. But the shiny, new convictions of current Conservatism are nevertheless flagged up as the righteously shining light at the end of the tunnel.

I had lunch recently with a member of parliament, newly elected last year, but with far greater political credentials already in place as one of the main exponents of the Big Society philosophy. This is a man, unlike many of the current political crop, who has done a great many other things before he entered the political arena. He has been a banker, run large charitable organizations, been a university teacher, and heaven knows what else. He is exactly what politicians should be: middle-aged but youthful, energetic, intellectually rigorous and highly experienced in the ways of the world. But he gives the impression that all of that has been cast aside in favour of the message of the moment. He appears also to assume that this message is so right that, at the least, anyone with whom he might be lunching is bound to agree with it. Political thought has become so narrow and so much for the moment that it no longer encompasses history or allows for the reasoned argument of dissent.

Hopes that the Liberal Democrats would be able to provide that argument appear, in the usual clichéd phrase, to be in tatters. With the Liberal Democrat dream in pieces after their trouncing over electoral reform in the referendum this month, rubbed in by the loss of many council seats, the prime minister and his Conservative cohorts are on top of things in government and their arrogant determination that they know best is as arrogant and short-sighted as I would have expected at the point I voted Lib Dem in hopes of diluting their impact.

Nick Clegg has fallen dramatically from grace on the back of the referendum and local election results. No surprises there, but I had hoped for better things from Cameron than the way the referendum battle was fought, which owed nothing to his Big Society principles so far as one could see and everything to old-fashioned party political backstabbing. The referendum should undoubtedly not have taken place on the Alternative Vote, the most downgraded form of proportional representation — many who are long term believers in PR voted against this watered down version, so now we have the worst of all worlds. PR is seen as having been damned by the people in favour of the status quo and the Nos are chortling. No further hope of reform is expected for generations.

Reform of the House of Lords is now once again on the table. Nobody believes the current system is right, nor has done for more generations, but there is little impression of any real energy or urgency driving reforms to change this historical anachronism and more of a general flim-flam and fluffing about round the edges of necessity. The trouble here is that there has never really been a proper plan and nobody knows what they actually want, so a few more committees are round the table and may or may not come to any conclusions any time soon.

Greater zeal for change in the National Health Service is going to get the government into hot water. We all know that the NHS has huge problems, that costs and wastage must be reduced massively and the whole unwieldy machine made more efficient if it is to survive our economic woes or be fit for purpose in the future. But we love the NHS, quite rightly. For all its faults, it is a remarkable institution, and to reduce it to some sort of a system of medical insurance will be a tragedy that will inevitably impact most on the poor. Plans to take much of the administration of the NHS out of the hands of bureaucrats in favour of putting doctors in charge of commissioning are seen as mistaken, not least by many doctors. At the moment, there is a push-me-pull-you effort in government with Clegg backing off from the reform agenda he earlier appeared to support in order to shore up his collapsing public image, and the Conservatives enraged but nervous, too, of the popular feeling.

The philosophy of Big Society stresses “independent institutions, and horizontal ties” and not “what the state can do for you or you for the state but on what we can do for each other”. New Labour believed in the importance of ‘community’. The trouble is that we still want our State institutions, we don’t entirely believe in a reinvention that makes us, in the most simplistic terms, rely on our fellow man to supply our needs; a form of society that, like it or not, we have been moving away from consistently as society and communities have become ever more fluid and even family ties are looser bound. A growing voluntary sector has to be a good thing, but we are a long way off from wanting to lose or dramatically reduce the institutions that continue to underpin our lives and provide us, especially the poorest in our society, however shakily, with a safety net.

Aneurin Bevan fought passionately for the NHS in 1948, urging his colleagues and the nation’s doctors to “take pride in the fact that, despite our financial and economic anxieties, we are still able to do the most civilised thing in the world, put the welfare of the sick in front of every other consideration”. After more than 60 years, nobody imagines healthcare reform is not needed as much as electoral reform, but today’s ministers suffering today’s financial and economic anxieties would do well to go back to their history books before they end up throwing the baby out with the bath water in a fit of innovative zeal.