Hardline Tory Brexiters have been calling for months for the government to publish detailed plans showing how we would cope without a deal. This was supposed to be a macho display vis-a-vis the EU which would strengthen our negotiating position.

Now within weeks of getting the Cabinet to grant them their wish, the Brexit extremists are wobbling. They worry that the more the public hears stories about stockpiling food, getting the army to deliver medicine to ill people and parking lorries on motorways, the more they will see how mad it is to crash out with no deal at all.

A Cabinet deal to publish reports every week throughout the summer has now been scrapped, according to Tim Shipman in the Sunday Times. Instead the 70 or so documents will all be put out on on the same day in August – a tactic that seems designed to ensure they get little media coverage.

The government has also asked companies involved in no-deal planning to sign non-disclosure agreements to stop “alarming details leaking out”. A source told the Sunday Times: “People will shit themselves and think they want a new referendum or an election or think the Tory party shouldn’t govern again.”

Over the past few weeks, the Brexit extremists’ bravado about “no deal” has faded. The new Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, couldn’t give a straight answer about whether food, 30% of which comes from the EU, would be stockpiled – saying he didn’t want to comment on “selective snippets” before eventually insisting there would be adequate supplies, without saying how.

As more facts have emerged, it is clear why the Brexiters are running scared. They don’t have a plan to stockpile food, in part because we don’t have enough storage space for frozen food – and you can’t store fresh food for very long anyway.

Meanwhile, plans for lorries to be parked at the disused Manston airfield in Kent while they wait to cross the Channel have been branded “nuts”, according to the Sunday Times:

One source said parking lorries at the airport was “nuts” and “just won’t work” since those released from Manston would have to snake their way to Dover along a 19-mile stretch of the A256, which has 12 roundabouts and in parts is a single carriageway… Between 400 and 500 lorries an hour need to arrive in Dover to fill the ferries and keep them to schedule. Just 80 an hour could get there from Manston.

It is, of course, good to plan for all eventualities. But that’s precisely what the Brexiters haven’t done. They didn’t think through what Brexit meant during the referendum. They didn’t think through how they would handle things when they pushed the prime minister to trigger Article 50 without a plan. And as they ramp up calls for us to crash out with no deal, they still haven’t got a plan – except, it seems, to try to hide the facts from the public until it is too late.