The first step along what Andrew Adonis hopes is the road to reversing Brexit starts a few miles upstream from where it all began 19 months ago.

Fresh from introducing proposals for a second referendum into the House of Lords, the Labour peer travelled to Durham on Friday to begin a national tour that aims to convince the poll-weary country to think again.

In June 2016, this city was a rare island of EU support from the moment regional results first started pouring in from nearby Sunderland. Even here, high up in the cathedral precincts, the notion of reopening wounds is a hard sell.

“I dread the thought of a second referendum,” says Lucy Smout Szablewska, a local remain campaigner who has nonetheless come along to hear the plan. “I dread the feeling of not being able to talk to certain people, or knowing there is this elephant in the room we have to avoid, or having a discussion and falling out, because it becomes so really, really personal.”

Arguably, little has healed at all. Just as Adonis was being denounced by some for advocating an anti-democratic “neverendum” during a passionate Durham Union Society debate, his political nemesis and Brexit champion, Jacob Rees-Mogg was busy fending off protesters in balaclavas at a similar student event in Bristol.

But it is the sheer volume of unfinished Brexit business – political, economic and emotional – that gives opponents hope that the divided country can be persuaded to re-examine its decision. As the government’s exit negotiations flounder and threaten to tear the Tory party apart over a customs union, campaigners herald signs in recent opinion polls of an appetite for giving the country a final say once the terms of deal are known.

“Be optimistic, be confident,” Adonis urged a local Labour club meeting during Friday’s trip. “We can change the course of events.”

Though this Blairite former Liberal Democrat is as far from his party’s current leadership as it is possible to get, he remains optimistic that Jeremy Corbyn can also be persuaded to change his mind on the merits of a second referendum – “that ship has sailed,” the Labour leader said last week.

The plan is to appeal to Corbyn’s young supporters, who happen to be the most passionate remainers. Central to this is to try to make sure the figurehead is not the unelected peer who once advocated tuition fees but instead that the focus is on a group of student activists who are accompanying Adonis on the road and leading their own messaging online.

“Young people are the answer,” says Femi Oluwole, one of the leaders of Our Future Our Choice. “Another referendum is the only way to reverse this without civil unrest. It’s one of those rare situations where two wrongs will make a right.”

The Our Future Our Choice group is pushing for a second referendum. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

If Labour can be persuaded to work with Tory rebels and support the Adonis amendment when the EU withdrawal bill goes before parliament in the autumn, the hope is that a second poll could be held before Britain leaves next March. If there is no time, then – in theory, at least – a short extension of article 50 could see a referendum in June 2019, three years after the last one.

Fanciful as the notion might seem today, there are already some Labour MPs who are sympathetic. “I really hope that Labour’s position is that we go for a second referendum, especially if the deal is not a good one, which is what it looks like,” says Roberta Blackman-Woods, the City of Durham MP. “It would need a groundswell of opinion but I get the sense that things are changing and if it’s the considered view of the party and there’s enough MPs behind it, we’ll get there.”

Those in local leave constituencies, such as the Sedgefield MP, Phil Wilson, are more cautious. “I think it can work but only if it is a vote on the final deal,” he says. “I keep telling Chuka [Umunna, Labour MP] and others that this is not about London; it’s about convincing people up here.”

Though there is an appetite for something that could get the country out of the mess it finds itself in, in just one hour at the Labour meeting addressed by Adonis on Friday a plethora of concerns are aired.

Profile Andrew Adonis Show Who is Lord Adonis? Andrew Adonis, a Europhile Labour peer who previously served as transport minister, was appointed chair of a cross-party National Infrastructure Commission in 2015. He resigned two years later over the government's hardline Brexit policies, which he said were “causing a nervous breakdown in Whitehall”. He has been an outspoken critic of plans to leave the European Union after the June 2016 referendum and pledged to "relentlessly oppose” the EU withdrawal bill in the Lords. Adonis is the son of a Greek-Cypriot postal worker and a trade unionist. He went to the fee-paying Kingham school in Oxfordshire before studying modern history at Oxford and gaining a doctorate. He worked for the Financial Times and later the Observer, where he often wrote on class and public services. Adonis was elected as a Social Democrat to Oxford city council in 1987 before serving for the Liberal Democrats until 1991. He was selected as a parliamentary candidate for the party in 1994. However, he joined the Labour party in 1995 after Tony Blair removed clause 4 – a broad commitment to socialism – from its constitution. In 1998, following Labour’s landslide victory the year before, he was appointed as an adviser to the Downing Street policy unit. In 2001, he was made its chair and was widely understood to be one of Blair’s key aides, credited as the mastermind behind many of the government’s flagship education policies. He quit the policy unit in 2003 to work full-time on a biography of the late Roy Jenkins, although he retained his post of senior policy adviser. In 2005, he was awarded a peerage, becoming a government minister without ever having been elected to parliament. Photograph: Geraint Lewis/REX/Shutterstock/Rex Features

Some feel the decision has been made. “If you have a referendum, that’s what the people say,” says Karen Bruce, a retired teacher. “I don’t think you can just keep on having a referendum if you don’t like the vote.”

Others, particularly the Corbyn supporters, worry it could be a distraction from more important social reform and that the EU is an obstacle to radical change. Samuel Osman, 21, a law student, says: “My issue with a second referendum is that a lot of the debate around it is ‘these stupid poor people they didn’t know what they were doing’.”

“I don’t think we’ll be thinking about Brexit in five years. I think it’s going to disappear,” he adds.

It is often the youngest who are most anxious about putting the Corbyn project at risk. “I am just terrified that we end up in a position where we lose the referendum,” says Nicholas Hayes, a 15-year-old schoolboy in the audience. “As a socialist, my battle is to get a Labour government.”

Adonis seeks to reassure him that if it gets to point where parliament is ready to ask the country again, it will be because the pitfalls of a Tory-led Brexit will be painfully apparent to all. Though he does not envisage the government falling immediately if it loses, it can only help in the long run.

“I can’t wait for another referendum because we will win by a big margin,” he says. “But we have to get there first. What we have to do is bring the leadership of the [Labour] party around and then organise like we have never organised.”