Millennials may be reminded of the Give Yourself Goosebumps spin-off books. Older readers probably remember the 1970s Choose Your Own Adventure series by Bantam Books. Black Mirror fans may have caught the new-year release of Bandersnatch, Charlie Brooker’s interactive drama on Netflix, in which the viewer is able to determine the show’s ending(s).
The choose-your-own-adventure format is said to allow “for a realistic sense of unpredictability, and leads to the possibility of repeat readings”. It occurred to me that this sounds a lot like Brexit, in which everything is up in the air and we have had the same debate over and over again for months.
Tomorrow sees parliament vote on Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement (all 585 pages of it), a vote she is expected to lose heavily. What happens after that? Well, who among us knows? (Nobody among us knows.) Jeremy Corbyn will no doubt call for a general election. May might well murmur about going back to the EU for amendments, even though all 27 countries are united over the fact that is not going to happen. Certain cabinet members and backbench factions may push variously for a Norway-plus solution; an extension or revocation of article 50; a second referendum or, for some absolute selfish masochists, no deal. CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE! Except the decisions remain in the hands of a political class seemingly obsessed with internecine wars, jostling for leadership and briefing the Sunday papers; the ending remains unwritten.
The problem, really, is that some of the pages at the beginning were skipped. The Irish border issue, for instance, which none of us appeared to acknowledge. The 3.6 million EU citizens in the UK, now deemed queue jumpers by the prime minister, apparently weren’t factored into any plans. Perhaps because there really was no plan. The truth is, probably none of us expected the two-year rollercoaster (so far) that has turned out to be Brexit – and at the moment it feels as if we are stuck hanging upside down on a loop. It’s an adventure – but in the end, perhaps one none of us would have chosen.