This week Keir Starmer said that, if there is a second EU referendum, “nobody is ruling out remain as an option”. Aghast, Conservative chairman Brandon Lewis tweeted that “Labour would take us back to square one on Brexit”. But what exactly is square one, anyway?
One theory attributed the phrase to the old division of a football pitch, in radio commentary, into eight numbered squares. But the OED thinks board games are the most likely source.
Its first example comes in 1952, in the Economic Journal: “He has the problem of maintaining the interest of the reader who is always being sent back to square one in a sort of intellectual game of snakes and ladders.” I thought this sounded catty, but happily the full review (of a book on the American economy) judged that the author had “admirably” succeeded.
So let us remember that the coiner of “back to square one” (the Oxford economist EM Hugh-Jones) meant it rather playfully. And being back at square one is not necessarily a bad thing if one is confused – as a writer for the Listener put it in 1965: “Let us drop the logical knot that twin studies have tied us in and go back for a moment to square one” – or if, as with Brexit, the alternative is to topple off the edge of the board into a sea of molten lava.
