'A monument to foolishness' – what might the Brexit museum look like?

The Museum of Brexit has a plan: “To bring together stories and items that can help preserve our nation’s history.” It has an objective: “To bring together a collection that will recall, for future generations, the story of the struggle for the United Kingdom’s independence.” It will be a new Museum of Sovereignty. Nobody knows the difference between a plan and an objective, but that’s the great thing about sovereignty: it is a synonym for “any old nonsense”. The museum is calling for submissions, which is great, as I have some ideas in this area.

It could order its exhibits by material, like the Pencil museum, but I would advise a chronological approach: what is the story of this struggle? Hence it should include an artefact of David Cameron. He thought he was being incredibly clever because he had seen into the future, knew that he could make any promise he liked without being held to it, and was then savagely bitten on the arse by the unfolding of events for which he had made no contingency plans: maybe just a picture of his stupid face.

It will need to do better than a picture of the £350m bus-promise, because people keep Photoshopping it and nobody can remember what’s true. It needs the actual bus. Possibly, the bus itself could be the museum site, since, in my experience, a website with pictures of ivy across a mock-college facade rarely has an actual building. The museum should also contain Nigel Farage’s Breaking Point poster, maybe juxtaposed against swarming-immigrant pictures through history. For multimedia variety, a few dodgy Facebook ads, the Twitter feed of a Russian bot-factory and some audio of two people who have never used the word “sovereignty” in their lives, explaining why it’s their number-one priority and always has been.

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There is plentiful footage of leavers explaining how we could be Norway, and why its trade deals were incredibly easy, how we could retain the customs union and why the Good Friday agreement was sacrosanct, then, five minutes later, explaining how we could never have been Norway, and trade deals were bound to be complicated and take a decade, the country had voted decisively against the customs union and why Northern Ireland could go jump in the sea. Liven the whole thing up with some bunting. Give away free copies of the Daily Mail. Get Prue Leith to open it. There it will stand, like Ozymandias, except shaped like a bus, a monument to foolishness.