Be prepared, says Patrol Leader Dan Jarvis... but he won’t say what for

Patrol Leader Dan Jarvis cleared his throat and adjusted his necker. He had an important announcement and you don’t want to do that with a wonky woggle. “I was a Boy Scout,” he told the troop, drawing sighs from those who could imagine him with knobbly knees. “And I remember the motto: ‘Be Prepared’.” Jarvis wants the nation to be like the Scouts or perhaps, he added, his old chums in the Parachute Regiment, motto: “Ready for anything”.

We must be poised with our tin openers. It was assumed that we all know how to tie a clove hitch and have badges in whittling and fire-lighting. If you fail to prepare, prepare to fail. Jarvis fell victim to this when he was briefly seen as Labour’s next leader during the Corbyn years. He summoned the press to a Big Speech, where he gave us water with sliced cucumber in it. The leadership talk soon ended. I’m not suggesting that the Honourable Company of Scribblers are bribable but David Cameron provided brownies and smoothies for his leadership bid and look where it took him.

Now Jarvis is a second-tier frontbencher, minister for tinned goods and wind-up radios . MPs raised three fingers in salute and he did his best to convey the importance of being prepared for catastrophe while trying not to suggest there is any reason to panic. One incautious remark and there would be a run on baked beans. Jarvis said the Government was taking steps to ensure that Britain was the most resilient it could be during a crisis .

But of what kind? He spoke of extreme storms, wildfires, floods. “Everyday emergencies,” he called them, as if you find them in Tesco. He said that only one in eight Brits feels prepared, compared with 70 per cent in Spain, but muddling through is part of the national character. Panic slowly The minister wants us to be ever ready but not to overdo it. “Add one item per week to the shop,” he said. Have enough bottled water for three days, sign up for a priority services register if you need support in a power cut, check on your neighbours.

Everyday caution. What he didn’t say was the W word. “I want to be clear that we are not launching this campaign because of any specific or imminent threat,” he said. Yet it was only a couple of days ago that the defence secretary had warned of war in 1,000 days and now Jarvis was saying that the preparedness campaign would last for three years. Some Tories did the maths. Mark Pritchard said we had never been told to stock up on corned beef in case of a winter storm before.

“If this is about war preparedness, I think the Government should come clean and treat the British public with a bit more respect,” he said. Sir Edward Leigh, Father of the House and a nostalgic Cold Warrior , asked if it was time to dust off Protect and Survive. Jarvis, anxious not to see people whitewashing their windows to deflect the nuclear flash and unscrewing the dining room door to form a fallout shelter, repeated that this was just about “storms or flooding”, though conceded that Russia poses a “very severe threat”.

What to believe? Preferring to take resilience advice from Angela Rayner, I conducted my own readiness analysis and found that claret supplies are worryingly low, though the Sauternes stock is healthy and there are some jars of imported foie gras, so we should be good for a few days. No need yet to contemplate that vile bottle of chocolate and orange liqueur that I won in a church raffle. Keep calm but let’s not get carried away.