I’m a civil servant working for a UK government department. We haven’t been directly convulsed by Brexit yet, but hundreds of us will soon be conscripted into the Brexit crisis thunderdome. Welcome to Operation Yellowhammer. This is basically an emergency plan that prepares the government for a no-deal Brexit. It is currently winkling thousands of officials from across Whitehall out of their day jobs to focus on helping Brexit-facing departments – Defra, the Department for International Trade and the Home Office – to cope with the havoc that will engulf them if the worst happens.

Yellowhammer, eh? Who dreams up these Brexit crisis-limitation codenames? It’s probably a secret cry for help from some wizened Treasury or Cabinet Office official. That’s why Operation Brock, which tested no-deal readiness to keep the British freight industry moving, was supposed to sound like an army exercise to prepare British people to safely find, kill and cook badger.

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It’s been suggested that Operation Yellowhammer alludes to the call of the eponymous bird, whose call sounds like “a little bit of bread and no cheese”, and is therefore a handy precis of the UK’s post-Brexit food rationing policy.

We should by now be in Yellowhammer’s final, perhaps terminal, stage. In my own department, virtually all of the several hundred likely to be Brextracted are still waiting to hear. We know that directors are working behind the scenes to identify these poor buggers. But the worrying fact is that most people don’t yet know when they’re going to be deployed, how long for, or what they’ll be working on when they are. Then there’s the question of whether they’ll actually be qualified to do whatever their new job is, given a) anyone who’s spent even five minutes in a trade negotiating room has already been rounded up like a prized Angus by DExEU and DIT’s HR departments , and b) even now, nobody knows what is going to happen.

As reported by Civil Service World, around ten thousand civil servants are working on Brexit, with tens of millions of additional pounds being spent on consultancy fees. But 5,000 more civil servants will be needed, with the Institute for Government suggesting that even this won’t be nearly enough. You can’t help but wonder what could be achieved if this concentration of treasure and talent was lavished on other pressing national issues – education, housing, health, energy, climate change, the next series of The Bodyguard. We’ll never know, will we?

With fewer than 60 days to go, the civil service’s morale and ability to deliver any sort of Brexit seems to be evaporating fast

So what will it look like when the Yellowhammer fuse is finally lit? We don’t know that either, but I suspect a screenwriter will one day pitch a mockumentary about this as The Office meets The Poseidon Adventure with a Benny Hill soundtrack. Not even Benedict Cumberbatch could save it.

My theory is that Yellowhammer hasn’t really got going yet because the grey eminences in charge have calculated that the risk of being defenestrated for wasting billions on a no-deal Brexit that never happens is slightly higher than the risk of being overwhelmed by a no-deal.

Meanwhile, coverage of the civil service’s orbit around the Brexit plughole has become more and more disquieting over the last couple of years, ranging from cautious realism to despair. Missing from this has been any acknowledgement of the reality that civil servants are only as effective as the ministers they’re legally obliged to serve under. And under the current crop of ministers, with fewer than 60 days to go, the civil service’s morale and ability to deliver any sort of Brexit seems to be evaporating fast. With the clock ticking down, the stakes just keep getting higher.

No-deal Brexit will be horrendously complex and time-consuming to implement, but the mess we are in is political and social, not technical. That’s why officials are haunted by what government ministers still can’t or won’t admit: that any Brexit is going to hurt the country, but a no-deal Brexit is going to rip our arms off, disrupting almost every aspect of British public life except the weather (and maybe even that too).

According to some reports, some senior civil servants insist that Whitehall is more or less prepared for Britain crashing out of the EU without a deal, but my experience of Yellowhammer, plus the almost daily torrent of stories about the stockpiling of food (which alone is a terrifyingly unpredictable scenario), ferries, lorry queues, immigration and other issues covered by 106 technical notices, suggests there are going to be one or two drones on the no-deal runway that we haven’t thought of yet.

And what seems clear is that all Brexit outcomes will damage the UK civil service, both as a place to work and in terms of the faith that the public places in it. The death threat made against HMRC permanent secretary Jon Thompson sadly doesn’t seem to be a one-off – other high-profile civil servants have been targeted too.

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My hope is that, whatever outcome the parliamentary tombola eventually coughs up, ministers, the public and the press should resist the temptation to trash us, either for not sufficiently internalising the alchemy of Brexiteer logic, or for not sufficiently resisting it.

Are there any circumstances under which we should resist orders to plan a no-deal Brexit even if we believe this to be a disastrous step? Absolutely not – in fact it’ll be us who are working hardest to make sure the lights stay on, long after Brexiteer MPs have scuttled off into comfortable obscurity. Besides, civil servants need to keep the trust of whichever government follows this one.

I’m a bit of a cynic, but I still believe the UK’s public servants – yes, including some of the current crop of politicians – are among the most committed in the world, even if history is busily repeating the lesson that even top-notch administrations can sleepwalk into catastrophic shitshows.