Bobby McDonagh: Brexit would be as dead as the dodo if it hadn’t been nailed to a political perch

It has been reported recently in the media that a gene editing company, Colossal Biosciences, is aiming to bring “back to life” the proverbially extinct dodo, a species of bird last seen alive in Mauritius in the 17th century. The idea is to draw on the DNA of long deceased dodos now on display in museums around the world, and to reassemble key traits of the dodo within the body of a living relative, apparently the common-or-garden pigeon. Colossal Biosciences has reportedly attempted the same trick with mammoths and elephants.

What has received far less scientific attention is another recent, in many ways more interesting, experiment that has been taking place in the UK. The remarkably ambitious project, spread out over several years now, has been to ascertain whether it is possible to recreate – or to use the technical term to “de-extinct” – a nation that no longer exists. Occasionally referred to as “the Brexit experiment”, the objective of the clinical trial, described by experts as highly dangerous, has been to explore whether it is possible to breathe fresh life into a long defunct version of Britain. The idea is to recreate a nation that can thrive disconnected from its nearest neighbours, that can go it alone and still be a successful global player, that can pursue a buccaneering trade policy, and that still has notions of ruling the metaphorical waves. It is a Britain from the sepia-tinted past. Like Monty Python’s parrot – an avian stiff and famous even as the dodo itself – that Britain of yesteryear has ceased to be. It has run down the curtain and joined the choirs invisible.

As I understand it, the exciting Brexit concept is to mine the genome of an imperial past so that key traits from that glorious history, also on display like the dodo in various museums around the world, can be grafted on to a living, albeit distant, relative – namely the mid-sized, mid-ranking, shrewdly self-aware, intelligently outward-looking, modestly confident Britain that its neighbours had come to respect and admire.

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Some scientists have reportedly highlighted an ethical dilemma concerning the implant of material from the mammoth genome into the reproductive system of elephants. They point out that the process is likely to prove very stressful for today’s pachyderms. Similarly, the grafting of nonsensical, long-gone notions of Britannia on to a modern living nation is having a stressful impact on today’s United Kingdom, on its economy, influence and internal cohesion.

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Moreover, a respected “dodo historian” has pointed out that the great difference in size between the 17th-century bird and today’s pigeon constitutes a particularly significant obstacle to the success of the experiment. A similar problem arises in the context of Britain’s departure from the EU, namely the gulf between the great and glorious past that the Brexit project is designed to restore and the humbler reality of the present.

A major difference between the parallel paleogenetic and political experiments is that, in the latter case, all scientists and other experts have been proudly kept out of the political laboratory

Another, perhaps insurmountable, challenge posed for the dodo experiment is that the posited location for the rewilding of the vanished bird, if it can be brought back to life, is its native Mauritius, an island still replete with the predatory wild pigs and monkeys that caused it to disappear in the first place. The environmental factors, if the UK is one day to shake off the shackles of its modest post-imperial global repositioning, are hardly more propitious. For a country that seeks to drift away from its natural herd, there are plenty of modern-day predators out there.

There was a recent flurry of excitement among the Brexit alchemists when they stumbled across an idea they believed might enable them to forego the laborious process of gene editing. On reflection, however, they decided that releasing Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg directly back into the wild would be too risky.

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A major difference between the parallel paleogenetic and political experiments is that, in the latter case, all scientists and other experts have been proudly kept out of the political laboratory. However, this has not stopped many of the wizards of political alchemy, who still promise to conjure up gold from the base metal of Brexit, from donning a mantle of apparent authority by presenting themselves as a “research group”. Alas the men in white coats have not been working in the Brexit laboratory, but they will hopefully be coming along before too long to take the alchemists away.

Prof Ewan Birney of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, commenting on the dodo project, is reported as saying that there are people “who think that because you can do something you should, but I’m not sure what purposes it serves”. The professor was not, of course, talking about Brexit, but he could have been. For true believers, Brexit still has the Python parrot’s “beautiful plumage”. However, an increasing majority of the British people seem to recognise the folly of Brexit and that, if the main political parties hadn’t nailed it to a perch, it would be as dead as a dodo.

Bobby McDonagh is a former ambassador to London, Rome and Brussels