How the £120mn ‘Festival of Brexit’ became something much weirder

How the £120mn ‘Festival of Brexit’ became something much weirder

Nelly Ben Hayoun sits in a repurposed Tube carriage in east London, preparing to send music to the Moon. No, wait. Preparing to collaborate with the Moon. “It’s not like a penetration,” she clarifies. Even by the creative standards of Shoreditch, her plan is far out.

An artist who has worked with Nasa and Pussy Riot, Ben Hayoun is organising a convoy of garishly coloured, alien-themed vehicles across England this summer. Her team has experimented with sending a saxophone track, via transmitters in Italy and Ghana, to the Moon, where it resonated three metres into the rock before bouncing back to Earth. I can reveal that the returning sound is like a car radio losing signal. It is . . . not pleasant.

But perhaps the strangest thing is that none of this would be happening without Theresa May. In October 2018 the then prime minister, famously strait-laced, danced on to the stage at the Conservative party conference and promised a “year-long festival of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”. Her audience of activists politely applauded. Did they know what they were signing up for? Did any of them guess that their grab at flag-waving patriotism would end up in the hands of artists such as Ben