The Yellowhammer report is nothing like a real contingency plan

The latest Operation Yellowhammer disclosures put me in mind of a book I read a few years ago describing an unsettlingly plausible zombie outbreak in Britain.

When the streets were too full of undead shamblers for the government to ignore, the Home Secretary asked officials who were barricaded in his office for the contingency plan to deal with this apocalypse. He was handed one sheet of A4 on which was simply written, ‘run away screaming.’

I wonder whether Michael Gove had anything much more coherent to rely on when he took up the reins at the Cabinet Office at the back end of July and asked for the latest no-deal arrangements? Barely a month before, the senior civil servant at the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) responsible for contingency planning had bailed for the private sector, hot on the heels of the HMRC mandarin in charge of frictionless border preparations.