06-07-2025
Civil servants have discovered their most pointless money-waster yet
If you go down to the website today, you're sure of a small surprise. Trying to identify it is a bit like trying to solve one of those old-fashioned childhood puzzles where you had to find the differences between two similar pictures. Look hard, then harder. Still can't see it?
Well, the logo, once chastely black and white, has blossomed into colour. The background is now a limpid sky-blue, and instead of lurking shyly at the foot of the lettering, the full stop has turned an ethereal shade of Cambridge blue and hovers halfway up the type.
This cost of this momentous change – part of a 'brand refresh' of the site undertaken by the communications agency M&C Saatchi – is reported to be more than £500,000. And if that seems a bit steep for a spot of colouring-in with blue crayons, it comes with a hefty explanatory dossier, written in that curious argot used by officials hoping to deflect comparisons between their latest brilliant wheeze and the Emperor's New Clothes.
The functions that the cerulean blob is intended to undertake are as multifarious as they are baffling. 'The dot can take on different roles – guiding users through content, journeys and experiences across channels', the guidance explains, adding 'it should always serve a clear purpose'. If only the same could be said of the dossier, which suggests that the dot should act as 'the bridge between government and the UK', and 'a guiding hand for life'.
If the dot is starting to sound like the changeling child of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Hand of the King from Game of Thrones, there is more to come. The dossier also suggests that the dot could depict a coin being saved into a piggy bank, or a text bubble in a guide on how to vote.
But there is a stern warning for larky civil servants thinking of busting out into a full-scale homage to the dotty artist, Yayoi Kusama. They are not to 'use the dot in a decorative way or distort or skew the dot'.
All this may evoke an episode of the Radio 4 comedy, The Consultants, in which Chesney fixes the leaky 'e' that has developed in the alphabet. The annals of consultant-led branding are littered with tragi-comic disasters, from Consignia to Abrdn (the meme-haunted rebrand of Aberdeen Asset Management). But the satire isn't quite as hilarious when it is hard-pressed taxpayers who have coughed up for the 'journey', or wild goose chase, on which the blue dot is to lead us.
If only the corridors of power were populated by classicists rather than PPE graduates, someone might have twigged that Aristophanes of Byzantium, the grammarian, editor of Homer and head librarian of the library of Alexandria, could have delivered a similar dot for free.
A couple of millennia ago, the great scholar devised a system of placing a dot, or punctus, at various heights in a text to denote rhetorical divisions in speech. Were he currently working in Whitehall, he would instantly recognise the fabulously pricey new dot, hovering at the midpoint of the surrounding type, as his very own stigma mese – a dot placed midway up the surrounding type – waiting patiently since 200BC to guide the public on a journey through the promised land of channels.
