Britain is preparing to tell households to keep tinned food, bottled water and other basic supplies in case normal life suddenly becomes considerably less normal.
The planned Cabinet Office campaign is intended to help people cope during national emergencies including cyberattacks, extreme weather and disruption caused by hostile states.
Or, in language understood by every British household: check the cupboard, locate the tin opener and stop assuming the corner shop will remain fully operational throughout the apocalypse.
THE GOVERNMENT HAS DISCOVERED THE CUPBOARD
According to reporting by the Guardian, the campaign will encourage people to store essentials such as tinned food and bottled water.
The idea is not that every family should construct a concrete bunker beneath the patio and begin exchanging baked beans for ammunition.
It is that households able to look after themselves for the first stage of an emergency would leave public resources available for vulnerable people who need immediate help.
The exact official shopping list, recommended quantities and launch date have not yet been published. Until they are, anybody claiming you urgently require 400 toilet rolls and a generator capable of powering Berkshire is getting ahead of the evidence.
WHAT IS THE COUNTRY PREPARING FOR?
Planning has reportedly intensified around several different risks:
* Flooding and extreme heat
* Wildfires and drought
* Cyberattacks against infrastructure
* Serious disruption caused by an international conflict
* A hostile-state attack affecting Britain
These risks are not interchangeable, and the announcement does not mean ministers believe any particular disaster is imminent.
It means a cyberattack, flood or extended power failure becomes much harder to manage when millions of people discover simultaneously that their emergency provisions consist of half a lime and a bottle of salad dressing.
The Cabinet Office says the aim is to raise awareness of simple household preparations while improving the country's wider resilience.
WHY NOW?
The Government has faced a sequence of warnings about extreme weather, drought, wildfires and threats to national infrastructure.
Ministers have also been reassessing Britain's preparations for military and cyber disruption. The Guardian reports that Iranian-linked hackers were blamed for a recent attack that temporarily shut down a small British power generator, although officials said the wider energy system was never at risk.
That distinction matters.
Britain is being asked to prepare sensibly, not behave as if enemy tanks have been spotted between aisles four and five of Tesco.
PLEASE DO NOT PANIC-BUY THE COUNTRY
Public emergency advice produces two predictable British reactions.
The first is sensible people checking their cupboards.
The second is somebody loading 180 tins of soup into a trolley while insisting everybody else is causing the shortage.
There is no announced instruction to rush out this afternoon. The detailed campaign has not yet been launched, and official guidance should be followed when it is published.
A useful emergency cupboard should contain things a household can actually use and replace over time. A pyramid of unfamiliar beans purchased in terror will eventually become a pyramid of expired unfamiliar beans.
BORING PREPARATION IS STILL PREPARATION
There is an amusingly British quality to responding to hostile states and climate disruption with canned goods and bottled water.
But the underlying principle is painfully ordinary: emergencies are easier to survive when people have thought about them before they happen.
Nobody needs to spend the evening digging a bunker.
Finding the tin opener would be an encouraging start.
