Biohazards, Putin, extremism… we’ll need more than a few tins of beans

Illustration by Dominic Mckenzie. Illustration: Dominic McKenzie/The Observer

At 2pm: tell citizens to stockpile batteries and bottled water. At 5pm: call general election. Who drew up that timetable? What a juxtaposition: 14 years of Conservative rule; a nation cramming its cupboards with emergency baked beans.

But then you listen to Oliver Dowden’s “resilience” speech, given on Wednesday to the London Defence Conference: “biosecurity hazards… catastrophic risks… geopolitical tensions… malign online actors… cyber-attacks”. And you listen to Rishi Sunak’s, three hours later: “darkest of days… the Cold War… Putin’s Russia… Islamist extremism… migration weaponised by hostile states”. You realise there’s a theme.