In 1941, the refrigeration company William Douglas and Sons completed work on a brick-and-steel-frame cold store for meat and fish, on a site at Goldsborough in North Yorkshire. Although the building was demolished a couple of years ago, Theresa May and her newly appointed Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, might still like to have a look at the site, to get a sense of what the central management of a food supply chain crisis really looks like. Because right now they don’t seem to have the first clue. It’s vast and it sits alongside what was once a railway track. What’s more, it’s only one of 43 built that year around the country, alongside 40 grain stores. And all for a population only a little more than half that of today’s.

Last week, in evidence to the Brexit select committee, Raab announced that the government would be working to secure “adequate food supplies” in the event of a no-deal Brexit, which could impede the free flow across our borders of the 30% of our food currently imported from the EU. No, the government itself would not be stockpiling food. Quite right. It doesn’t have a way of doing so. Instead, it would be up to the food industry to deal with it. They are comments that have left the entire British food supply chain – farmers, producers and retailers – utterly baffled.

“There isn’t warehousing space in this country,” Ian Wright of the Food and Drink Federation, which represents the interests of UK manufacturers, told me. “There doesn’t need to be, because companies do not hold huge inventories. It’s massively financially inefficient to do so.” Only 49% of the food we consume is produced in Britain, he said. The rest comes from abroad, and most of that is in the form of ingredients to be turned into the foods we eventually eat. It arrives just in time to be used, after which the finished goods are immediately dispatched. “I don’t think the government understands that,” he said.

Or, as the head of one of Britain’s biggest food manufacturers put it to me, “That lot couldn’t run a fish and chip shop.”

Helen Dickinson, chief executive of the British Retail Consortium, which represents all the major food retailers, agrees. “It’s just not a practical notion,” she said. “There’s no space to store food. Supply chains are extremely fragile.”

Perhaps the food industry would have a better grasp of the government’s thinking, or be able to explain its failings, if there had been any contact with ministers or civil servants, but so far there has been none. “We suggested to government months ago that we should talk about contingency planning,” says Wright, “but we haven’t yet had the conversation.” The same applies to the big supermarkets. “As far as I know, none of the supermarkets have been approached,” says Dickinson. Ditto the farmers. “None of the elected officials or officials at the NFU has had any of those conversations,” a senior figure at the National Farmers’ Union told me.

Should we be concerned? According to Wright, absolutely. “You need only one unexpected shock in the supply chain and you’ve got no product very quickly.” He points to the recent acute shortage of CO 2 , a by-product of the fertiliser business. It led to supply problems with everything from beer to crumpets. A no-deal Brexit would make that one episode look like child’s play. “It would be disruption on a pretty epic scale, at least for a number of weeks,” he says. “If this does go wrong, we would see a very speedy erosion of choice.”

That would be the case in any year, but over the next 12 months supply problems are going to be exacerbated by other challenges facing British agriculture. As we report today, the NFU is calling a drought summit to discuss the critical weather-related issues facing farmers across the UK. Many cattle are already being given winter feeds because grassland has been scorched. Some are being sent to slaughter early to cut losses. Milk yields are heading downwards and potato crops have been badly hit.

Raab’s solution is just to find other countries to make up the shortfall. “The idea that we only get food imports into this country from one continent is not appropriate,” he said. But if that means looking towards the United States, he is deluding himself.

Last week the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London released a briefing paper written by, among others, Professor Tim Lang, looking at British food security post-Brexit. It pointed out that the US is currently only the tenth largest exporter of food to Britain. “For the US to replace the combined food imports from the other nine of the top 10,” the report said, “would require a vast food flotilla and logistics operation exceeding that of the 1940-45 Atlantic convoys.”

The reference to the second world war is apposite. The Atlantic convoys, like those cold stores, were created to counter an external, existential threat to national survival. This peacetime threat has been created entirely by the ludicrous ideology of Brexit, its mismanagement by Theresa May’s government and infighting within the Tory party. Our currently abundant food supply may well be downgraded to merely “adequate”. It is a dereliction of duty and an abnegation of the basic responsibilities of good government, on a truly staggering scale. Those involved should hang their heads in shame.