The government admits no-deal Brexit will be a catastrophe – yet it carries on regardless

God knows who chose Yellowhammer as the name for the government’s clandestine no-deal contingency planning operation, or why. But I like to think it emerged from a mischievous subconscious. An anagram for that little bird, as fittingly tweeted yesterday, is “Orwell mayhem”.

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.

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.

Whether even that would be sufficient to remove this peerless abomination of a government and end the insanity isn’t, in the hilarious absence of a written constitution, remotely clear. But in the dwindling game of escapist fantasy, it still looks like the best bet.

Failing that, or a last-minute EU capitulation to the Johnson-Cummings (Bummings) terrorist tactic – a long shot, if less so now that Germany has convivially joined us on the brink of recession – we appear to be absolutely screwed.

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. But if Yellowhammer – “a devastating health check on the country’s preparedness,” according to a Cabinet Office source – is in the middle range of doomsday scenarios, the assumption has to be that at its apex of horror, no deal would be cataclysmic beyond belief.

Sadly, the name of the government’s planning for that doesn’t provide an anagram half as cute as Yellowhammer’s. The best you can rearrange from Black Swan is “claws bank”, which barely hints at the Bank of England’s inadequacy to protect sterling and the economy, or the prospect of the ATM machines running dry in a tidal wave of panic buying.

As for the Orwell mayhem, the guiding principle behind this government’s criminal refusal to share its findings with its victims, not to mention the heraldic motto of Brexit itself, has been lifted wholesale from Big Brother’s trio of tenets. Ignorance is Strength.