What’s the worst business to be in right now? Sheep farming

What’s the very worst line of business you could be in, if we’re heading for a no-deal Brexit? Not finance, for sure: there’s a noticeable absence of squealing from the City, which has evidently made all the contingency plans it needs to continue making numbers dance on screens and booking the proceeds in convenient domiciles. Car manufacturing, on which I’ve written so much in recent weeks, clearly has its challenges — but the impediments of Brexit are no more than a tiresome sideshow compared to the industry’s wider technological and market issues. Fishing has been a bad career choice ever since we joined the Common Market and probably can’t get much worse. But the one thing you really wouldn’t want to be right now, I suggest, is a sheep farmer.

Let me précis a passage from Michael Gove’s speech to last week’s NFU conference, in which he expressed eloquent sympathy for farmers without offering any certainty as to the conditions under which they will operate beyond this month.