What’s in your larder? I ask this not in the Nigella sense — of ensuring there’s always dried porcini mushrooms, Noilly Prat and arborio rice in the cupboard, lest an unexpected midweek guest turns up expecting supper — but in the face of the coming Apocalypse. Or, as the Government — on launching a ‘national resilience conversation’ last week — insists on calling it, a bit of ‘temporary disruption’ due to ‘storms’ and ‘wildfires’.
Taxpayers would mind less if their cash was going where it’s needed
Now I’m no Max Hastings, but, like most people with half a brain, I’m aware that Vladimir Putin is perfectly capable of slamming an intercontinental ballistic missile into a British city. For the Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting (formerly of NHS fame), to talk up stockpiling while talking down the threat as akin to a little local difficulty is as risible as it is offensive. Naturally, it’s resulted in the inevitable headlines shrieking ‘DON’T PANIC!’.
Streeting says households should store extra food and water and write down important telephone numbers, which is a terribly sweet suggestion, as I don’t think I’ve written down a phone number since about 1999. But back to the larder. On BBC Breakfast, a Treasury minister called James Murray was asked about the contents of his larder and had to ‘fess up that, actually, it just contained ‘a lot of coffee’. Angela Rayner tells us that her emergency provisions would include Sauvignon Blanc (I think she’s a chicken wine kind of a girl) and mascara.
Looking around my larder, there are several jars of marmalade (Jan ’25 batch), because no one eats it apart from me. There are also a lot of eggs, as I’ve added a few hens to my flock, but this has nothing to do with Mr NHS; it just helps fulfil my Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, fantasies. The bottle of Talisker is low, because I’ve had Covid for weeks and, like Churchill — who did know how to behave in a crisis — I like to microdose with whisky and hot water.
I’ve also, inadvertently, stockpiled 800 Marlboro Gold — thanks to my non-smoking husband taking advantage of the ‘four cartons for the price of three’ deal at JFK airport, without realising the import limit is 200. We’ve also got in twice as many logs as usual (I notice that Labour have shut up about banning our right-wing wood burners) and added some bottled water (still, not San Pellegrino) to the Waitrose order. And we continue to bask in the smug glow of our biomass boiler, powered by wood pellets, installed shortly before Putin went into Ukraine.
‘Prepping’, which used to be the preserve of wacko conspiracy theorists stockpiling fuel and crossbows on their smallholdings for a non-time-specific End of Days, is now on all our minds. But here’s the thing. If the Government wants us to ‘Be Ready’ by laying in extra baked beans and bog roll, how about, as a quid pro quo, they ensure that this country is ready — by whacking up spending on defence?
The larder of the armed forces is currently as bare as that of the Treasury minister with the sole jar of Nescafé that’s been sitting there so long that the granules have gone all sticky and hard, so you can’t get a teaspoon in it. Of our six Type 45 destroyers capable of shooting down missiles, at least three are thought not to be operational. Israel has an Iron Dome; we have a rusty colander. And we have, in Streeting, a defence secretary who knows the square root of nothing about defence. I’m about to spend the equivalent of the entire annual defence budget on a .22 air rifle (£99.99, plus box of pellets, £8.99) — not as part of the ‘national resilience conversation’, but in ongoing efforts to keep my eldest son off games consoles.
We have a Budget coming up this week, but the red box is unlikely to have much, if anything, in it for defence. The Chancellor, John Healey, the Chief Weasel, helped bring down Sir Keir Starmer over his failure to raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030. Yet he welched on this once he got to the Treasury, and now Healey and the prime minister are wittering about meeting the NATO target of 3.5 per cent by 2035, long after they’ve been ejected from office. I’ll believe the ‘billions’ he is reportedly finding down the back of the sofa exist when I see them.
Given that my household sits in Labour’s crosshairs (Wes — this is a MILITARY REFERENCE), being both deep in rural Britain and in the tax band that pays for All Of The Things, I suspect we’re about to get rinsed again. What can we expect on Wednesday? VAT on black Labradors and the mansion tax threshold reduced until it includes your Nan’s bungalow in Margate are my tips.
Taxpayers would mind less if their cash was going where it’s needed. Streeting’s demands for the country to be ready for war within a 1,000 days ring hollow. As things stand, we’ll soon need to collect those black rubber dinghies landing on our shores and donate them to the Senior Service. And with that thought, and vaguely patriotic notions about the Squander Bug, I pull out my phone, open the Waitrose app and replace the bottle of Talisker with Famous Grouse.
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