Why we should all start hoarding cash and loo rolls

If there’s anyone in Britain who knows how to keep grocery shelves stacked, it’s former Tesco chief executive Sir Dave Lewis, who has been named as Downing Street’s ‘supply chain tsar’. Application of Tesco’s mastery of logistics and fierce discipline on suppliers should keep delivery trucks moving, so long as they have drivers. But even Lewis won’t be able to avert the pre-Christmas surge of panic-buying which I’m told Cabinet Office planners fear — especially if it’s combined with a major outage in the banking system.

Last week’s Facebook crash was a warning that blank screens are only a couple of burned-out circuits or a cyberhacker’s half-hour away. And if we’re looking for vulnerabilities, consider the contactless card transactions that now account for more than a quarter of all UK payments and for which the limit goes up this week from £45 to £100: what happens if the systems behind the card terminals go down, shortly followed by ATM networks overwhelmed by demand for cash? It may be comforting to know that the Bank of England (working with the Treasury and the National Cyber Security Centre, among other bodies) has recently updated its ‘operation resilience’ guidelines for just such an eventuality.