Employing data from a corpus recording 25 years of debate in Britain about the nation's place at the heart of Europe, this article examines the interaction of irony, sarcasm and metaphor in public discourse. It demonstrates hat the ‘discourse career’ of this metaphorical slogan skives into two strands, i.e. an affirmative, optimistic use vs ridiculing uses that represent the heart of Europe as ill, dead, non-existent or putrid. It is claimed that discourse participants need to preserve the optimistic template version as a reference point in discourse memory to attain the aimed ironical and/or sarcastic effects, and that the latter are crucial to keep the metaphoricity of the slogan ‘alive’.