Out of Their League

With the sunny uplands of liberty looming closer every day, mere retailers are attempting a ludicrous pretence that they know more about retail than the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove. The recently-appointed Minister for Not Having Stabbed Boris in the Back Twice in a Row stated in a BBC interview that, should Britain choose to chastise the obdurate Euro-wogs by crashing out with no deal, supplies and prices of fresh food would not be adversely affected. However, the British Retail Consortium claims otherwise, predicting shortages and extra expense as a result of new customs checks and lack of necessary storage space. For all that their spokesbeing added a touch of much-needed plausibility by blaming Christmas and the French, the retailers have clearly taken the present era's compulsory optimism to an unwarranted extreme. They seem to imagine that, just because they spend their working lives organising the purchase, storage, transport and sale of goods in large quantities, they have some sort of clue about the mechanics of retail. They have failed to take into account that Michael Gove is a Murdoch flunkey who, even if he no longer writes about shopping himself, certainly knows people who do.