There is simply no subtlety to the UK’s adventures in self-parody these days. Take the so-called Festival of Brexit and the criticism levelled at this £120m deceased elephant by everyone from appalled auditors on the culture select committee to visitors who somehow didn’t enjoy being forced to sit through what they were being shown. Total fiasco, you say? Appalling waste of public money, you say? Completely different to what was promised, you say? Despite having been years in the planning, no one knew what it was actually supposed to look like, you say? The people who came up with it are blaming its failure on anyone but themselves, you say? I mean … I mourn the time when a metaphor stole imperceptibly into the British consciousness instead of grabbing it by the lapels, shaking it like a rag doll and head-butting it in the nose while screaming, “I AM A STONECOLD METAPHOR, OK PAL?”
If you were one of the 67 million-odd UK citizens who missed this event over the summer, the Festival of Brexit was formally rebranded as Unboxed, given the ominously woolly aim of celebrating “creativity in the UK”, and has been running all round the country since late spring with a series of events that were this week laid bare with hilarious dryness in a quite majestic article in the House magazine. Any connection with what was once feared to be a jingoistic-sounding idea was actively shunned by the various organisers, and in many cases heroically undermined. Unfortunately, a hugely successful national moment did not ensue.
The many creative happenings seem largely to have run the gamut from the deranged and poorly executed to the deranged and poorly attended. Lowlights are too numerous to cover in full here, but special mention must be made of the unwatchable (and indeed unwatched) video content culled from some misconceived lamplight/drone event on the Norfolk Broads whose wildly expensive funding would arguably have been better handed to the disadvantaged women and victims of abuse who somehow found themselves participating in it.
Other standouts? At one leg of a strand called Tour de Moon, the reporter watched a deeply moving speech by a man in a wheelchair explaining how his life-changing fall had left him excluded from his passion for clubbing. This was immediately followed by a DJ shouting: “Come on, everyone needs to stand up from their chairs for this next tune!” Any number of quotes from people featured in the article could have found their way on to a sarcastic poster advertising the discreet charms of Unboxed. Nadine Dorries “absolutely loved it”. “There were a lot of learning curves,” euphemised the creator of the world’s first inflatable playground, which in practice proved physically unstable.
Unboxed was tilting at what its impresario called a “stretch target” of 66 million visitors. It got 238,000. The entire thing clocked in at £120m of taxpayers’ money, which – strangely – has yet to prompt a government minister to fume about how many nurses it could have paid for instead. (But of course, despite bringing pleasure to millions and occasionally billions, only footballers are judged by how many nurses or teachers they could have paid for.)
To put it in alternative terms, each visitor to one of Unboxed’s many events could have been given £500 cash instead of being, for example, smashed over the head by kids toting inflatable moons, as happened at one malarial-sounding thing entitled Moon Games. Looked at in another way, Unboxed cost more than four times the money spent on the Platinum Jubilee. (Surely there could have been economies of scale with the latter event? At the very least, both could have featured hardline national treasure Joan Collins.)
The disowning by Brexiteers was under way before it had even begun. South Thanet MP Craig Mackinlay complained that not calling it the Festival of Brexit was “a great opportunity missed”. Like communism, which has simply yet to be done right. Or – because all metaphors now have to be so sledgehammer as to result in head trauma – like Brexit itself.
Looking back, were there any clues that Unboxed/the Festival-of-Brexit-as-was would be a complete turkey? Well, yes. Not least that from the get-go it was described as “an excellent idea” by Jacob Rees-Mogg. In Hollywood, you’d lose your job if you greenlit a flop this big; I note Rees-Mogg is widely tipped to become business secretary under Liz Truss, the Conservative right’s latest ridiculous and obviously terrible idea.
As for the idea’s genesis, it was unveiled in Theresa May’s 2018 speech to the Conservative party conference. If you’re a fan of how the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft to shit, do consider that this precise May speech was entitled Campaign 2022. This was a reference to the 2022 general election date she was apparently strategising brilliantly towards.
Anyway … here we all are, in 2022. As you may recall, what with having been forced to live through it, we have suffered two prime ministerial defenestrations since 2018, and are now staring down the barrel of Trussonomics. Or the unlit uplands, as some are now calling them.
Even back when May debuted the plan, which she apparently envisaged as a celebration of national renewal, the Festival of Brexit proved a straight-to-meme idea, as did most of the other things said at that particular conference. To pluck some at random, Jeremy Hunt took the opportunity to compare the EU to Stalin’s Soviet Union for “stop[ping] people leaving”. Amazingly, he would end up being the “sensible” candidate in the next leadership contest.
Rees-Mogg himself was back then touting a “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Canada” Brexit model to the party faithful, explaining: “That is a word developed by a nanny, and nannies are jolly good things.” “Brexit will be a success,” he added, “because it is a Conservative thing to be doing.” So yes: any idea that came out of the 2018 Conservative party conference should have had a concrete dome built over it, with all those operationally responsible gifted with a show trial and a restorative trip to the labour camps.
Instead, many of the architects are eyeing up seats around yet another cabinet table, while £120m is probably the smallest single sum wasted on their epochal vanity project thus far. As for Britain’s “renewal”, that is once again predicted to be just around the next corner.
And yet, is it? Despite the fact that a bizarre amount of journalism has now made itself about predicting events as opposed to reporting on them, I do aim to avoid any serious forecasts in my columns. But an internet search reveals that back in the day, I suggested that by the time the Festival of Brexit came around we would be “pooling our corned beef and lightbulbs”. A reminder that pretty much the only thing recent administrations have delivered on is making grimly facetious jokes come true.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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Marina Hyde will be in conversation with Richard Osman at a Guardian Live event in London on 11 October. Join them in person or via the livestream – book tickets via the Guardian Live website
