There are few things more ageing than realising that what you vaguely regarded as your recent past has suddenly become history. So imagine the shock of stumbling this week across @newdawn1997, a new online history project launched by the University of Nottingham, tweeting the story of Tony Blair’s rise to power in real time as if it were happening now.

Wait, 1997 is history now? The year I started dating my husband, got my first national newspaper job? But of course it is, dammit. The year of Princess Diana’s death and Dolly the cloned sheep might as well be a foreign country now, exotic and undiscovered.

On this day 20 years ago, Labour was breaking 50% in the polls and rising. “Things can only get better” was a slogan used without irony; change still sounded exciting not scary; and it felt as if the world were looking at Britain for all the right reasons. Twenty years ago this March, Vanity Fair released its iconic Cool Britannia cover, featuring Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit beneath a union flag duvet with the headline “London swings again”.

Even then, of course, there were millions who felt no part of this. But the rest of us were loudly self-confident, with much to be confident about. A nation enjoying unprecedented economic growth, with money to spend and, crucially for the Labour party, a mood – after years of public service cutbacks – to be generous in spending it.

Well, that’s all gone the way of the Gallagher-Kensit marriage, and feels about as ripe for resurrection. The dizzy optimism, the heady thrill of change is back all right, just not for those who felt it last time. Paradoxically, the only people still apparently convinced that without their eternal vigilance Tony Blair could make a comeback tomorrow are Jeremy Corbyn supporters.

The late 1990s was a period of dizzy optimism - ‘but all that has gone the way of the Gallagher-Kensit marriage’. Photograph: Peter Jordan/PA

This isn’t going to be yet another critique of Corbyn, by the way, because there is no point. The evidence is there for anyone with eyes, most recently in this week’s report from the Fabian Society noting that under its current leadership the party has haemorrhaged former voters (half of those voting Labour at the last election wouldn’t now) and not gained nearly enough new ones, putting it on track to lose barrowloads of seats at the next election. If you don’t hold Corbyn in any way responsible for that, one more article won’t change your mind. But for those who imagine Corbyn alone is guilty of doing this to the Labour party, a little history may be useful.

For 1997 wasn’t just the year of Labour’s unstoppable rise, but of the Tories’ descent into the wilderness. The political landscape is infinitely more complicated now, but the one advantage of being old enough to have had a ringside seat on reporting it is the ability to draw some parallels.

The first lesson from what we must now call history is that renewal comes up from parties, not down from leaders, because confused and dysfunctional parties unerringly pick the wrong ones.

Like William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith, Corbyn isn’t the sole cause of failure but the symptom of a party that still doesn’t get why it lost. It took eight years, three leaders and three defeats for the Tories to accept that their problem wasn’t being seen as too soft on Europe and crime, but too hard-hearted and out of touch with an increasingly socially liberal world. Only once it had come to terms with this did the party swallow its pride and choose an electable leader in David Cameron.

But seven years in, Labour remains trapped in the first stage of grief, namely rage against the old guard who lost. And like Tory activists two decades ago, they assume voters are angry with the party for the same reasons they are, ignoring all evidence that Labour lost primarily because it was seen – however unfairly – as spendthrift and out of touch. Until the party gets that message, it’s never going to pick a leader capable of rebuilding trust on those issues without jettisoning core principles.

‘The husky-hugging years were horribly painful for many Tories, but confounding voters’ expectations of what it meant to be a Tory ironically enabled Cameron to win.’ Photograph: Andrew Parsons/PA/Reuters

The second lesson from history is that the latter task isn’t impossible. The husky-hugging years were horribly painful for many Tories, but confounding voters’ expectations of what it meant to be a Tory ironically enabled Cameron to win and govern ultimately – on taxation and welfare, at least – as a conventional Tory.

His rebranding exercise was shallow, but that in a way was the point; it never went deep enough to threaten core Tory principles and, as it turns out, the brand was still quite popular underneath. Similarly, there are still millions of people in Britain keen to vote for a mainstream left-ish party of government, if Labour would only meet them halfway.

But politics is not a sentimental game and meeting people halfway requires the visible handing-on of batons. New Labour is not coming back, nor are its architects – not only because it’s now so tarnished but because even its leading lights would do things differently if they were reborn into a world this anxious and insecure.

The questions have changed, times have moved on, and the heavy intellectual lifting now will be for the bright sparks of the 2010 and 2015 intakes who have the time and space to think ahead. What is an economically beneficial level of immigration, in a post-Brexit world where freedom of movement presumably disappears; and how to make the political case for it? How will the NHS be funded by 2025-30, which is probably the earliest a Labour party could hope to be in power?

The third lesson, however, is perhaps counterintuitive. The Tory wilderness years were glorious times to be a journalist; infighting raged so ferociously that you couldn’t move without tripping over a juicy row. Conventional wisdom was that it hurt them, that voters punished divided parties.

But look at the way Labour’s stock has continued to fall even though the vast majority of Corbyn’s internal critics have either buttoned it to avoid blame, or simply given up. It’s almost as if the fight were the only thing keeping Labour alive, or at any rate in the headlines; at least voters unhappy with the current trajectory could see something happening, awkward issues perhaps being thrashed out, resolution inching closer. There’s something eerie about the stillness now; not calm, but stagnant. And history is what those who don’t keep moving forwards ultimately become.