Inside the Brexit labyrinth
Charlotte Higgins
The idea of the labyrinth—the myth of the confounding, confusing building built by Daedalus to house the Minotaur— has been on my mind lately. It was the topic of my last book, Red Thread, and the image of this edifice—at once a prison for the monster and a trap from which his victims cannot escape—seems everywhere, particularly when the subject turns to Brexit. Shortly before 29th March, the original B-day, an image of Theresa May seemingly trapped inside a lime-green maze kept popping up on a newspaper website. I’m still mentally scarred, too, by a photograph taken last autumn of a madly grinning Jeremy Hunt snapped at the centre of the hedge maze at Chevening, the foreign secretary’s official country residence, along with his European counterparts. At the time of writing, May and Hunt are still trapped in their labyrinths—and along with them, the entire country.