Forty-six years after being recorded John Lennon’s Imagine is still generating headlines. Earlier this month the process to give Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono a songwriting credit began and Donald Tusk, president of the European council, used its lyrics to send a message to the UK over Brexit last week. In addition, during the recent election campaign, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn announced that the ballad was his favourite song. What is it about Imagine?

Bridget Minamore: At best it’s overly sentimental, at worst it’s patronising

John Lennon’s Imagine is a crap song. Leaving aside what I think about the Beatles (let’s just say I’m not a fan), as well as my less-than-positive feelings towards Lennon himself, the song is, simply, a bad one. Overly sentimental at best and patronising at worst, everything from the infuriatingly catchy opening plinky piano keys to the basic, boring, irritating lyrics makes me want to rip out my ear canals. And the video? It’s just as bad. We see Lennon and Yoko Ono strolling through the foggy, leafy grounds of a country estate (all while Lennon avoids steaming up his ever-present yellow-tinted glasses), before arriving at the front door and seemingly teleporting inside. The whole thing does little more than point out the irony of singing about owning no possessions as you muck around opening windows in an under-furnished, but very grand, large, white room.

The lyrics, bastardised by everyone from Cee Lo Green to European council president Donald Tusk, are eye-roll worthy in the extreme. Green changed Lennon’s atheist line “and no religion too” to the tamer “and all religions true”, so managing to make Lennon’s original bar even clunkier than it was already. Tusk, meanwhile, felt it wise to invoke the lyrics when talking about the possibility of the car crash that is Brexit somehow being reversed. “Who knows?” Tusk began at this month’s EU summit, “you may say I’m a dreamer, but I am not the only one.” Because if there’s one thing that the never-ending Brexit saga has been missing, it’s the chance of success being seen as as unlikely as world peace. On further thought, maybe the analogy is apt.

Perhaps the worst thing about Imagine is that despite all its chat of dreaming, the song definitely exists in the real world. The second-favourite chorus for every dude with greasy hair, a crap voice and a badly tuned guitar to sing in the early hours of a festival jam session – the No 1 spot goes to Wonderwall which, for all its sins, at least is fun to sing in a big group – Lennon’s song is determined never to die. As a teenage choir member I remember singing Imagine on repeat at the Fairfield Halls in Croydon, perhaps the last place on earth that makes me feel hope for the world. As I’ve grown older, each and every cover version, from Emeli Sandé’s London Olympic ceremony closer to the impressively terrible Unicef group effort of 2014, has been more painful to listen to than the last.

On paper, the no borders, no religion, no possessions politics of the song gives off a pseudo-communist vibe I want to get behind, but I can’t. Every line is just so … sappy, and I cannot stand the level of earnestness needed to sing any of it with a straight face. Whenever I hear Lennon warbling “imagine all the people/living life in peace”, all I can think of is I’d feel a hell of a lot more peaceful if I could imagine Imagine out of my life forever.

Peter Aspden: Its theme is the evanescence of hope; never has the utopian dream sounded so fragile

Yes, it was conceived and recorded in a Georgian country house with an estate of 72 acres, yet asked us to think of a world without ownership. Its lyrics are facile. Unlike the very best popular music, it was out of kilter with its time: the beginning of the 1970s were famously tricky years for the “brotherhood of man”.

But look at the man who wrote Imagine: it was John Lennon, the angriest and most cynical of figures, who had dramatically renounced idealism in his previous album (“The dream is over, what can I say?”) and was embroiled, throughout this time, in the twin tribulations of primal scream therapy and child custody hearings over Yoko Ono’s daughter, Kyoko.

Think of Imagine as a wispy moment, rather than the clarion call it has become, or the punchline, pace Donald Tusk, of a bad joke. It is an intimate, vulnerable song, an exhortation to love and peace that sounds exhausted, from beginning to end. There is a Sisyphean tension in that delicate four-note motif that introduces each line of the verse. Here we go again, I really believe in this, but I know, deep down, it’s not going to happen.

Too introspective to be anthemic, not pompous enough to make a stirring hymn, Imagine is the tentative vision of a secular sceptic, who knows that imagination will never be enough. And that is what makes it so moving. The evanescence of hope is Lennon’s theme; never has the utopian dream sounded so fragile.

In the months that followed the release of the song, Lennon reverted to his toughened self. In a spat with Paul McCartney, conducted in the letters pages of the Melody Maker, he all but disowned the delicate beauty of his song: “So you think Imagine ain’t political? It’s Working Class Hero with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself!!” It really wasn’t, but the exchange showed Lennon’s desperation to reconcile the disparate parts of his artistry.

His next album, the poorly received Some Time in New York City, dispensed with the sweeteners altogether. He threw himself into contemporary American politics with irritated disregard for artistic form. It was a furious elegy for the brotherhood of man, crudely conceived, sloppily delivered: “Attica, Attica state, we’re all mates with Attica state.”

The oneiric chords of Imagine never seemed so far away. But they have lasted. And now Yoko Ono is rightly recognised as Lennon’s co-writer on the song. It was her 1964 poem Cloud Piece that helped inspire its writing, as Lennon himself acknowledged. And it is a reminder that Imagine is, more than anything, a love song, a quiet celebration of respite while the world all around is striking notes of discord and fear.