The Brexit 50p coin has been melted – now I need to think of another gift I want for Christmas

Have you decided what you’d like for Christmas?

I have. I definitely don’t need any more socks or ties, and I would be very upset to be given a “Brexmas” gift of an early general election.

What I’d really, really like for Santa to drop out of his sack on Christmas Eve is one of the special 50p coins commemorating Brexit. These phantasmagoric amulets really do exist, thousands of them, even though they never quite made it into your pocket or purse. Part political stunt, part physical embodiment of national failure, the Royal Mint struck them in a pre-production trial, and now, they say, they are to be melted down.

How much did the whole exercise cost? Can it be put on the side of a bus, along with the wasted £100 million Brexit publicity drive? That money was diverted from the public information budget usually devoted to stuff such as promoting the flu jab, firework safety and the Highway Code. And we don’t even get some wry amusement from our most ironic coin of the realm.

What a shame! They represent a fine symbol and token of our collective national Brexit trauma. The date inscribed on them, with unwise precision, 31st October 2019, is in fact only the latest of the many the coin designers have had to scrub. Just like “real life”!

The motto on the now melted coin, “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations”, was also a great monument to Brexit and the Leave vote in 2016 because it meant everything and nothing. It could cover anything from Norway-style soft Brexit through to Thatcherites’ paradise “Singapore on Thames”. It just about works for Remain or delay. It means nothing, and could be spun as a sort of antidote to the anti-social nastiness of Halloween.

The Brexit 50p is certainly a less elegant design than the 1973 “joined hands” version issued on entry to the European Economic Community.

Now the phantom 50p coin joins the long list of Brexit ephemera, including “Breggsit” egg cups, tea towels and tattoos of a grinning Nigel Farage. Like the famous glockenspiel player on Parliament Square, we will wonder if it really happened, and why. Maybe, like the fabulously valuable 1933 old penny, a few stray proof versions may escape from the Mint and sell at auction? Maybe senior ministers got a memento one? A coin, then, for the few not the many.

The good news, by the way, is that the Royal Mint is going to issue a Wallace and Gromit 50p instead, celebrating 30 years of Nick Park’s charming creations, who have served with such distinction as ambassadors of “global Britain”. The coin will be adorned with the Latin motto “Caseus praestans” – cracking cheese. I’d take one of those as a (second best) numismatic Xmas gift.