No Italian trousers and only paper cups in no-deal UK as scurvy and rickets return

The diatribe against Johnson today is largely about his treatment of the covid emergency. Some of it is fair enough,but it is all seen as a symptom of his appallingly caddish personality. It goes a long long way back. No doubt there is a Graun online archive somewhere where you can cut'n'paste

 When Boris Johnson gets caught, his first inclination is to wriggle.

He squirms and he splutters; if all else fails, he rumples his hair like a chastened little boy and mumbles regretfully at his shoes. When confronted with the story of his affair with Petronella Wyatt, he retreated behind claims about a “pyramid of piffle” rather than admit it was true.

The link connects to a piece by the same reporter (G. Hinsliff) in 2004!

the buck for all this [covid cockups] still stops ultimately with the man who took the big strategic decisions, and now seems curiously reluctant to account for them. 

Not Cummings then?

And, still burning still hurting:

When he hit a sticky patch with Brexit last autumn, he decided to prorogue parliament for five weeks rather than face the music.

'Face the music'!  Admit defeat at the hands of the Remainerati? Can you remember any of them now? Phillip Hammond? Dominic Grieve? John Bercow? Jo Swinson?

The blast from the past includes 'news' as well -- the Graun obviously reproduced the handout from a 'Brexit press briefing'. Welcome, Operation Fear Mk176:

No-deal Brexit will raise cost of UK household staples, say retailers

There are some covid legs:

With just six months to go before the UK leaves the EU entirely by exiting the single market and the European customs union, retailers fear further damage to a sector already reeling from the coronavirus crisis, with 5,600 job losses announced on Thursday from Boots and John Lewis alone....it was a misunderstanding to think that retailers and their suppliers had built up “huge Brexit war chests” and [Connolly -- see below] added that Covid-19 had exposed the fragility of the supply chain.

It's not just strawberry famines or the soggy tomatoes in BLTs: 

beef, which is imported in huge quantities from the Republic of Ireland, will go up in price by 48%, with cheddar cheese, another staple imported from across the Irish Sea, expected to cost 57% more....Oranges from Spain will cost 12% more, while the price of cucumbers will rise by 16%. Trousers imported from Italy will have a 12% levy slapped on them , porcelain kitchenware will also go up by 12% and drinking glasses made in Poland up 10%. ...“It’s not foie gras that we’re talking about, it’s mince, it’s cheese, it’s oranges, you know,” said Aodhán Connolly, the director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium in a Brexit press briefing.

Calcium deficiency, no cottage pie or spag bol, horribly dated kitchenware, (other people's) kids with scurvy, men with holes in their trousers, no cucumber for the sandwiches with the vicar, having to drink your wine out of paper cups -- total nightmare.