Brexit’s part in the Co-Op Live fiasco

If there’s one thing that must be particularly galling for Rishi Sunak, it’s that Britain normally loves a complete disaster. The Sinclair C5 (1985), the original Millennium Dome (2000) and the New Forest Lapland so bad that its organisers ended up in jail (2008) all became national obsessions.

Then came this year’s Wonka Experience, remembered in the title of a recent Channel 5 documentary as “The Scandal That Rocked Britain” but by the rest of us as a near-empty factory in Glasgow where kids queued up to get two jellybeans and a glass of limeade each before being scared by a woman in a silver mask who’d been hiding behind an Ikea mirror. It made headlines for weeks.

This addiction to spectacular failure explains a lot about the last 14 years. And it explains why the latest Great British Punchline is Manchester’s Co-Op Live Arena. It had to give numerous opening dates the elbow over safety concerns before finally opening this week, ironically with Britain’s safest band, Elbow.

Blame for weeks of delays, cancellations, falling air conditioning units, unfinished dressing rooms and bad PR have landed at the door of Tim Leiweke. He is CEO of Denver-based arena operators Oak View Group, for whom the venue is a joint venture with Manchester City, who play next door.

Asked to explain the catastrophe, Leiweke has blamed another – Brexit. Along with the pandemic, he told the Financial Times, it was the “root cause” of the venue’s problems. Tougher visa rules for European contractors are said to have helped create a shortage of a quarter of a million skilled workers in the UK construction industry.

“I’m just shocked,” Leiweke told the paper. “Towards the end of it, I wish we could have been doing double shifts and overtime but we just couldn’t find people that wanted to. We were paying people two and three times and we couldn’t find people to work, it was crazy.” He added that the work on the arena’s nine VIP lounges had been delayed because of Brexit-related import problems for the Spanish marble used on their walls.

It seems more certain than ever that in the years to come, the decision to leave the EU without any real plan will come to be remembered in the same way as the decisions to launch the BSB squarial (1990), Virgin Cola (1994), Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen’s Magical Journey (2014) and Laurence Fox’s London mayoral bid (2024).

Meanwhile, the Co-Op Live Arena is up and running, though it’ll take some time to outrun its reputation. Peter Kay appears for two rescheduled dates next week, and one imagines he’ll only have to walk onstage, gesture at his surroundings and say, “Who remembers Gerald Ratner, eh?” to bring the house down. Though hopefully not literally.