The latest and so far most capacious Yellowhammer leak clarifies the mayhem ahead in detail as predictable
as it is chilling. In health and social care, at air and sea ports, with food and petrol availability, on and either
side of the Irish border, disruption on a scale unseen in a modern western democracy outside wartime
awaits.
Orwell, meanwhile, is with us already. On secondment from the Ministry of Truth, Tory frontbencher
Kwasi Kwarteng this morning described all this as “scaremongering ... A lot of people are playing into
project fear”.
By all this, I refer to the contents of a report written in Whitehall. A government minister dismissed an
official government document, compiled by the best informed civil servants and commissioned by the
government, as cynical propaganda. Trump himself would instinctively make the Wayne’s World “We are
not worthy” gesture at that level of projection.
For those who find their nerves strained by the impending merriment of 1 November should Halloween
deliver the crash-out, the reassuring news is that Yellowhammer is by no means the worst of it. As one of its
unnamed authors bleakly points out, anticipating Kwarteng’s response: “This is not project fear. This is the
most realistic assessment of what the public face with no deal. These are likely, basic, reasonable scenarios –
not the worst case.”
In the absence of another judicious leak, the latter remains sealed within another government planning
operation with an avian code name. If what Yellowhammer foresees is only a middling, piddling brand of
chaos, you really, really, wouldn’t want to know what lies in Black Swan without a litre of Famous Grouse
for Dutch courage. As middling brands of chaos go, however, it goes plenty far enough.
The British government – to remind amnesiacs, the entity responsible for Yellowhammer – warns that the
results of a deal-free exit will include: shortages of medicines and fresh food; months of road blockages, with
massive tailbacks (two and a half days, apparently, at the start) for freight trucks at Dover; civil unrest across
the country requiring “significant amounts of police resources” (good luck locating that; scour every
McDonald’s in the realm, and it mightn’t be enough); ruinous consequences for providers of social care; and
a hard Irish border.
The poor and vulnerable will, as ever, be the most savagely affected. Whether lives will be lost isn’t spelt
out. But you cannot delve too far into the Sunday Times report before Boris Johnson’s clarion call of “do or
die” assumes a less comically theatrical tone than it previously had.
How horrendous it could become is known with any accuracy only to the
precious few in Whitehall and Westminster with access to the worst-case
contingency planning
If the Britain of today were more like football, we could relax. The original decision would go to VAR, and
be reversed. But it isn’t like football. What it is like, if anything, is the lovechild of Dante’s missing tenth
circle of hell and the equally missing Lunatics Take Over The Asylum sequel to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s
Nest. In this hellscape, there appears to be no review system to correct what is known in VAR parlance as “a
clear and obvious error”.
There might be if Jeremy Corbyn suddenly became eager to promote the national good above the kind of
transparent political posturing that so enlivened last week. In that mystical event, he’d alight on a
compromise caretaker PM whom all but a very few of his own MPs and all those of the other opposition
parties, along with enough Tory refuseniks to make the difference, could support.