NEXT time you’re in the supermarket you might want to – if you’ve got the cash - buy 20 tins of chopped tomatoes, a tonne of pasta, enough dried chick peas to make yourself a month’s worth of hummus, several pints of olive oil and as much French wine as you can fit under your bed.

Don’t wait until March next year because by then it will be too late, and in the event of a “no deal” Brexit, chances are you will be run down in the stampede of other panic buyers or caught in a Build-a-Bear style rammy for the last packet of economy pasta or box of cherry tomatoes.

For news emerged last week that the government were about to start stockpiling processed food for the possibility of a ‘no deal’ Brexit. This, The Sun, which published the revelations, reported as good news, a signal by the government that “no deal” was not a bluff. The government, it suggests, is so serious that they’re planning to “unveil 300 contingency measures”, of which this is one. So, stockpile away, work on your Blitz spirit, because come March, we may all need to be ready.

In other words, the doomsday scenario of shortages that was reported last month, but dismissed, by Jacob Rees Mogg, as “project fear on speed”, looks like it could be real. Indeed it seems to have triggered a project food security on speed. And not surprisingly, since in the UK we import 48% of the food we eat, and 97% of that comes from the EU or a country with which the EU signed a trade agreement.

British food shortages in recent years have had a kind of thrill to them. This is because mostly they’ve been a bit of a joke. There was the great hummus shortage of several years ago, which sent middle-class Twitter into an end of the world meltdown. Then, when the Beast from the East stopped movement, the shock of seeing supermarket shelves empty alerted us to both the magic and fragility food supply, but we kept calm and sledged on.

Most of us can’t remember any serious food shortages. The last time I recall anyone talking about getting a good stockpile of tins in was my dad in the early 1980s when and he’d been on a course for farmers about how to do prepare for a nuclear attack – which also seemed to involve living in a cupboard, a strategy which, thankfully, has yet to come up amongst the Brexit measures. As a child I was also baffled by the huge stash of lime marmalade my grandmother kept under her bed, until my mum told me it was probably because she had been through war-time shortages and rationing.

These are not times of war. Hence, one of the things that bothers me about all this stockpile chat is the way it is being almost celebrated according to a Brexiteer ideal of the UK as a besieged nation that will soldier on. Keep calm and stash a few things away and we’ll be fine. Don’t worry that the Soil Association has suggested that a North American Free Trade Area style deal with the US could lead to increased obesity. Don’t worry, either, about all those farmers too who are saying that a hard Brexit could break them. Stiff upper lip and all that.

But shortages are no joke. One of the scenarios that, reportedly, civil servants have been considering is that supermarkets in Scotland would run out within a couple of days. That’s not a recipe for soldiering on – that’s a formula for anger and dissent amongst those that didn’t vote to leave. No wonder the government thinks it needs a stockpile. One thing you don’t mess with is your people’s food supply.

POOR Elon Musk, billionaire and, now, snowflake. Few of us till recently were aware quite how horrible it is to be described as super rich. But, then, along the Tesla co-founder comes and tells us how hurt he is that people have been calling him a “billionaire” in articles on his proposal to get a submarine involved in the Thai cave escape. The word, billionaire, he said, is used to “devalue & denigrate” people. One of his supporters on this, the political commentator, Hasan Piker, even tweeted, “Elon Musk has the courage to ask, has ‘billionaire’ become the n-word of our generation?”

Now, "billionaire", as it happens, is an insult I could really take, and I imagine I’m not alone on this. If someone were to call me billionaire, I think I might really quite like it – especially if it was true. Musk, of course, is not the first privileged type to have a meltdown over the way the world talks about him. He’s just one of a list. A few years ago it was the freemasons – admittedly not all wealthy - moaning on about how they were “undeservedly stigmatised”. American comedian Josh Denny recently tweeted, “Straight White Male has become this century’s N-Word”. But, for rich man whining, no one beats Donald Trump, the man who once declared, “No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly”.

Rich, privileged white men – the most snowflakey demographic of all.