Everyone’s talking shite. I’m just breathing it in.

They handed me a chocolate bar at the conference. “Britian,” it said.

Britian. Not Britain.

A typo so confident it might as well have been strategy.

So how does something like this happen? On something so high-profile?

Was it the old agency designer manually typing it in at 2 a.m.? Autocorrect playing dress-up as sabotage? Did the Ad Man’s supplied text skate through unproofed because the squiggly red line didn’t appear on “Britian”? Maybe QA and Buddy Check were taking some time apart — the kind of professional separation couples counsellors would call “a cooling-off period,” or, as Ross in Friends would say, “we were on a break.”

Or is it… something else?

Because now the Tory Party have reaped what they sow — a highly embarrassing, perfectly packaged metaphor for the culture they’ve cultivated: underfunded schools, vanishing libraries, teachers burnt out while PR firms polish the slogans.

It was wrapped in optimism and brand guidelines — Pantone patriotism with a hint of palm oil. The slogan underneath read something about “moving forward together,” which, I suppose, is true if you include the spelling mistakes.

I used to work in a place that made this sort of thing. Brand as therapy. A campaign to convince a country it still had a pulse. Someone would have been paid handsomely to say, “Chocolate is a unifying message.” Someone else would have mocked up a mood board with words like honesty, warmth, and bite-sized progress.

I held it up under the strip lights and thought: This is every campaign pitch I’ve ever seen. Glossy. Hollow. Slightly melty around the edges.

A man with a lanyard asked me what I did for a living. I said, “Rehabilitation for overworked adjectives.” He didn’t laugh. They never do.

The chocolate was fine — sweet, functional, indistinguishable from the last idea someone sold for too much money. I bit into it and tasted the flavour of a nation that’s outsourced its soul to brand consultants.

And as I chewed, I thought about how cuts to education budgets, staff reductions, and library closures under successive Tory governments have real consequences. Illiteracy isn’t just a word; it’s a symptom — born of classrooms starved of funding and communities stripped of books.

Later, I saw a discarded wrapper on the carpet, next to a branded tote bag. 

Britian. Have a break from reality.”

And I realised:

I’ve spent half my career rebranding mistakes into meaning.

Maybe that’s the real national skillset.

– Tom Kite.