If you don’t have a plan, why not have a party? That is as good an explanation as any for Prime Minister Theresa May’s announcement, on Sunday, at the Conservative Party’s annual conference, in Birmingham, that there would be a Festival of Great Britain and Northern Ireland come 2022. It would cost about a hundred and twenty million pounds. The model is the 1951 Festival of Britain, which celebrated the U.K.’s emergence from the Second World War, as the damage from the Blitz and other battles was cleared away. The 2022 edition, in contrast, is being planned amid the rubble of various Brexit schemes, and in the face of austerity (there has been a spate of reports about a growing number of children arriving at school hungry) brought on not by war but by political choice. The Brexit Fest would be held a few months before a possible general-election date, suggesting another wild idea: the notion that this festival, at this moment, could be a political boon rather than a boondoggle.

At the Festival of Britain, in 1951, there was a Dome of Discovery, on the Thames, and a metal tower called the Skylon. At the Conservative Party conference this week, there are “Chuck Chequers” buttons on the lapels of various Tories. This is a reference to a blueprint for an orderly exit that May drew up at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence, this summer, which the hard-line Brexiteers thought gave up too much to the European Union. If May went up to European leaders and spoke more firmly, they maintain, she could get far better terms—more of the good things associated with free trade and without the obligations that they don’t like—while some members of her government continue to furiously defend the plan. In that sense, the “Chuck Chequers” fight represents a fantasy within a fantasy, since the Europeans themselves have already chucked Chequers. May had been all but summarily dismissed at a meeting of leaders in Salzburg last month and told, in no uncertain terms, that Britain was asking for too much.

And, instead of a Skylon tower, the Tories have a careening Boris Johnson, the former Foreign Secretary and careless Brexiteer, who, in a speech to a packed hall at the Conference on Tuesday, said that he thought the “authors of Chequers” might be prosecutable under a fourteenth-century law. (The precise legal basis was a bit vague.) He followed that with a bit about how European leaders were only pretending not to like May’s plan, in furtherance of a scheme to parade Britain, “in manacles” through the streets of Brussels, “like Caratacus,” a reference to a Roman-era British chieftain, which came across as a pushy reminder that everyone is supposed to be charmed by Johnson’s schoolboyish erudition, for some reason. “Chuck Chequers!” Johnson cried, as he waved, or, rather, wiggled, his fist in the air. Boris’s own plan, apparently, is for Boris to be Prime Minister.

The time for nonsense has, one might have thought, passed. Because of treaty measures that Britain triggered, it is on a path to leave the European Union in March, 2019. If there is no deal on how that’s done, Britain will abruptly become, in effect, a legal stranger to the European Union on that date. Unlike other countries that were never in the E.U., it may not have any framework for, say, getting pharmaceuticals approved for import or deciding what people from what countries get to cross the border on what terms. There are already worries about everything from insulin shortages to rolling blackouts across Northern Ireland, if there are no rules for transmitting the European power on which it depends, to British planes not being cleared to land in Europe. The British Micawber-like faith that something is bound to turn up may not be serving the country well.

Johnson has no monopoly on Brexit-themed heedlessness. Jeremy Hunt, his successor as Foreign Secretary, in the course of complaining that the E.U. was not being very helpful about Brexit, offered what he may have imagined was a cutting historical parallel: “It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving.” Predictably, there were quick, angry responses from those who remembered life under Soviet rule, including the Estonian Ambassador to Britain, who called the comparison “insulting.” (Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, the former leader of the nationalist-populist-rightist U.K. Independence Party, said that Hunt was “using my language,” the BBC reported.) And Dominic Raab, the Secretary for Brexit, used his conference speech to complain that all European leaders had had to offer at Salzburg was “jibes.” They were the ones who needed to “get serious” about Brexit, Raab said.

In this, he was echoing May’s argument, after Salzburg, that, if the Europeans didn’t like her plan, they should come up with their own—the metaphor that her ministers keep repeating is that the ball is in Europe’s court. Europe doesn’t seem to think so, as politicians and diplomats from President Emmanuel Macron, of France, to Michel Barnier, the E.U.’s chief negotiator on Brexit, have made clear. May, who will address the Tory conference on Wednesday, needs a new move.

The E.U. side is waiting, in particular, for the May government to say something rational about the trickiest Brexit problem: Ireland. The issue is an obvious one. Brexit means a hard, or at least hard-ish, border around Britain. But the lack of a hard border between the Republic of Ireland (which is part of the E.U.) and Northern Ireland (which won’t be, after Brexit) has been integral to peace on the island, not to mention to the way that many people there live their lives. The issue is complicated by coalition politics and by treaty obligations, including the terms of the Good Friday peace accords, and the Chequers plan only elided the dilemma. The E.U. has suggested what amounts to a special status for Northern Ireland, effectively drawing the Brexit border in the middle of the Irish Sea. In an angry statement after Salzburg, May said that the Europeans were asking her to “break up my country.” It was, she said, “something I will never agree to—indeed, in my judgment, it is something no British Prime Minister would ever agree to.”

So where does the border go? This question is on the long list of issues that might have been thought through more clearly before the Brexit referendum, and it is rightly enraging to many Irish that they are, as they have been too often in their history, simultaneously an afterthought and a point of intractable stubbornness for the British.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, emphasized in a speech in Freiburg, on Monday, that the fears about a no-plan Brexit, large and small, weren’t idle, and brought up another: “What’s going to happen to the two hundred and fifty thousand dogs and cats that leave the European continent every year?” Juncker said, according to the Guardian. Pets, until now, have also enjoyed a measure of free movement; post-Brexit, they may be facing quarantine. “If you want to go to Brittany for eight days for vacation then maybe you need to leave the dog or the cat at home, but maybe you’ll just stay home altogether.” Maybe, instead, they can take a trip to the Festival of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and wonder what went wrong.