British polemist Hilaire Belloc, introducing his primer on the Battle of Waterloo, hinted at a paradox: Did Wellington, acclaimed victor, in fact lose at Waterloo? Was victory inexorably won by Napoleon, whose hubris we believe lost him the battle? Such questions lurk not only because of the anniversary of Waterloo but also of the June 2016 referendum in which Britons decided to leave the European Union.

The putative Conservative government has your Brexit Diarist wondering — did we win the battle of independence, only to lose the war against European statism? We keep thinking of Belloc’s point about how the “object of a campaign is invariably a political object, and all its military effort is, or should be, subsidiary to that political object.”

With this in view, Belloc suggests that Waterloo was, ultimately, a failure for the Allied forces. For what was its political objective? Belloc lists them: “The overthrow of Napoleon’s personal power, the re-establishment of the Bourbons upon the French throne, and the restoration of those traditions and ideals of government which had been common to Europe before the outbreak of the French Revolution.”

Surveying the scene, though, Belloc saw defeat. Even within the lifetimes of the youngsters who engaged in the battle, reversals of fortune were apparent. Wrote Belloc, “The general political objective of the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies was not reversed at Waterloo.” The quarter decade of the conflict saw its ideals become too deeply embedded in European culture to be summarily uprooted.

Those aspirations were “sufficiently sympathetic to the European mind at the time to develop generously,” with the seed of its democratic spirit “spreading rapidly again after their defeat at Waterloo.” At best, Belloc concluded, the Allied victory at Waterloo “modified, retarded, and perhaps distorted in a permanent fashion” the political and social world envisioned by the French revolutionaries and Napoleon.

The parallels with Brexit are bracingly similar, never so as in this week. For the last 18 months, the UK has been subject to repeated “lockdowns” in an attempt to constrain the spread of Covid-19. Regardless of the costs to the British economy or its burgeoning debt. Heedless of the strains on personal well-being, social, medical, or psychological. Deaf even to pleas of health professionals who point to other prescriptions than lockdowns to meet the challenges of Covid.

Instead, the Conservative government has imposed measures that one former Supreme Court judge of Britain has likened to a “police state.” Is this the promise of Brexit, fulfilled? Where are the “sunlit uplands” with which young Boris Johnson summoned the Brexit vote? Hopes that this latest lockdown would come to an end June 21 — optimistically called “Freedom Day” — were dashed when Mr. Johnson postponed the restoration of liberties, ostensibly on fears of a new Indian strain of the virus.

Former Conservative leaders are critical of the Government’s equivocation. Sir Iain Duncan Smith confesses that his “biggest fear is that the more we delay, the less likely we are to come out of this,” warning, “We’ve got ourselves into a spiral of fear.” Meanwhile, Theresa May points out that “if the Government’s position is that we cannot open up and travel till there are no new variants elsewhere then we will never be able to travel abroad again.”

Even House Leader Jacob Rees-Mogg, once a hero of Brexit but now tarnished by his identification with administration policy, spoke out. “The Government doesn’t have the right to take charge of people’s lives,” he says. The Prime Minister was reportedly worried about parliamentary support leading up to the vote for extension, ringing up Conservative MPs to assert their acquiescence.

In the end, BoJo succeeded. Only 60 MPs voted against the Government measure to extend lockdown. Some 49 of whom were Conservative. Yet there was never any question that the Premier would have his way, with the Labor party eagerly egging on the Government’s coronavirus strategy. Where, Disraeli would decry, is the people’s right to Parliamentary opposition?

So, what of the Brexit cause now? Did Britons succeed in casting off the yoke of over-government from Brussels, only to see it imposed with ever greater determination at Westminster? Is Waterloo’s volte-face the fate of British independence?

Two days before that battle, when the indecision of French generals Ney and Erlon resulted in Allied gains, Belloc noted with admiration that Napoleon’s “resource under such a disappointment singularly illustrates the nature of his mind.”

BoJo’s own uncertainty about his parliamentary troops, and the existence of opposition both on the Tory backbench and in the country — Nigel Farage’s Reform Party and Lawrence Fox’s Reclaim Party — prove that “little platoons” that love their country and value their independence, fight on. Unlike the victors at Waterloo, whose objectives proved elusive, Brexiteers may yet conquer all.

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