One might ask: what was the point of the epilogue?
You clearly feel it was an insult to the reader's intelligence but I doubt that was the author's intention. I think his idea was to anchor the story at a precise moment in time – the period when Tony Blair was prime minister and the UK was often styled 'Cool Britannia' – partly for the benefit of younger readers who perhaps can't imagine life without video streaming, smartphones and all the rest of it, and would otherwise find parts of the plot incomprehensible, but also to add a note of nostalgia, which I think it does rather well.
