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. Or maybe that just tells us how real and imminent the authorities believe the risk to be.
Either way, it would be wise to stash an emergency wad down the sofa — and to study how Ireland coped with a long bank strike in 1970. When cash dried up, cheques and IOUs became the only available currency; and when chequebooks were exhausted, people made their own, according to one account, ‘on the backs of cigarette boxes and even on toilet paper’. Another reason, besides fear itself, to start hoarding loo rolls.
Strange bedfellows
My man in the hospitality suite at St James’ Park says there’s genuine rejoicing at the £305 million takeover of Newcastle United by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — chaired by de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman — in partnership with Amanda Staveley and the Reuben family.
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