Now they've put someone in charge of stockpiling food, I'm more convinced than ever May's got Brexit under control

Eventually we’ll be fighting each other to the death for an OXO cube, grunting ‘we’ve got our country back’

It’s all going so well. This week, the government told us they’ve appointed a minister for stockpiling food after Brexit.

When you’re arranging anything, such as a day at the beach, you know it’s going to plan when you have to appoint someone to hoard tinned peas to see you through the winter.

This is exactly what the Leave campaign had in mind when they told us about the benefits of Brexit, that our ministers would be giving us advice such as “the bark of a tree makes an excellent substitute for toilet paper”.

Adverts will tell us five portions of vegetables will keep us even healthier than before, because getting hold of them will involve swimming to Holland.

The prime minister insists there’s no need to worry, it’s just a precaution – which is reassuring, in the same way it’s calming when the doctor says, “we’ve examined you, and don’t be worried, but we’ve put someone in charge of finding you a new liver”.

So it’s proof of how liberated we’ll soon be, that we need to go through the same precautions Captain Scott arranged before walking to the South Pole.

The Leave campaigners must be delighted, as this is exactly why they persuaded people to vote with them. They put things slightly differently, such as “Leaving the EU will give us £350m a week to spend on the NHS”, but that’s much the same as “You’d better come up with a recipe for cooking your pets”, just slightly different phrasing.

Eventually we’ll be fighting each other to the death for an OXO cube, grunting “we’ve got our country back”. But there will still be nothing to worry about, because Theresa May will appoint a minister for cannibalism, so if we do have to eat each other we’re fully prepared.

The most encouraging side is those who were most enthusiastic about us leaving become more convinced, with every new level of chaos, that the answer is to leave even more. They make statements such as “We never had to stockpile food before, but that’s because the EU wouldn’t let us run out of food, they’d meddle in our nationhood, by sending us stuff to eat, and we’d pay for it, and then eat it, because they told us to. Now we’re going to be free to crawl in the mud looking for earwigs to make soup out of, because we’ve got SOVEREIGNTY.”

We could be queueing up for an egg cup of rice donated by the Red Cross, following an appeal on Somali television on behalf of the tragic bedraggled starving Brexit people, forced to lick monuments such as Tower Bridge for nutrition. And there would still be groups shouting “this is because Brexit wasn’t hard enough. We were betrayed, we should ban German shepherds and have our own shepherds and arrest anyone with joie de vivre as they should be having a laugh.”

And in the middle of this calm orderly path to our new future, Theresa May insisted to an American audience: “We are not turning our backs on Europe.”

It’s strange she even felt the need to say it, as there has been no suggestion anywhere the decision to leave the EU is because we’re anti-Europe in any way. It was just a practical decision, taken in a referendum forced by the UK Independence Party, with a slogan “let’s take our country back”, promoted by newspapers that spent 30 years putting headlines like “Hop off you frogs” on their front pages; the campaign to leave was one that emphasised friendship with our European neighbours, with arguments such as “Turkey are joining next, then they’ll ALL be over here and our kids will have no room in school because they’ll be full of carpets”, and it was all conducted in a spirit of cooperation and spiritual mindfulness.

So what could give anyone the idea that anyone in the Conservative Party is in any way against Europe?

They may have been at odds with certain aspects of Europe, such as the European Union, and European Court of Human Rights, and the customs union, and Europeans who wanted to come here, and Europeans who didn’t want to come here, and the land mass of Europe and the way they sit outside in the evening and their disgusting onion soup, but it would be ridiculous to suggest that means they don’t love Europe.

And the reason the negotiations got stuck is their fault. No wonder the government said the EU “ambushed” them, when they suddenly out of nowhere proposed something they’ve been saying all along they were going to propose. Who could have predicted that? It’s like going into Poundland, and underneath 70 signs that say “everything a pound”, taking a dishcloth with a £1 sticker on it to the counter, and saying, “I’ll give you 50p for it”, and the cheeky buggers say: “I’m afraid it’s £1.”

If people are going to negotiate in bad faith like that, there’s nothing we can do.

But at least the man she’s put in charge of stockpiling is David Rutley, who was an executive with Asda. So he’s the right man for the job, as he’s already been in charge of somewhere where they had to stack things on shelves, and one benefit of Brexit is this will become much simpler in stores such as Asda, as there will only be three things to stack.

In any case, we’ll have plenty to eat eventually, as we can grow apples and strawberries, although the Poles who’ve been picking them for decades will all have left, so it might just take us five years to remember how to do it.