Your guide to this week's looting

AS the coronavirus crisis rolls on, it’s only a small step from panic-buying to full-on looting. Here’s how to prepare for a fun – and profitable – looting spree.

Plan ahead

What’s your window breach strategy, brick or a bin? Is your face hidden from prying CCTV? All these questions need answering. If you forget what you went in for and make off with nothing but a handful of Kinder Eggs you’ll just look silly.

Go for the high-value stuff

If you get arrested fleeing Currys with an Acer laptop with only 4gb of RAM and no dedicated graphics card instead of an armful of MacBook Pros, you deserve the excessively harsh sentence you’ll get. And in prison you’ll be everyone’s bitch.

Don’t trust other looters

Just like all those other bastards stockpiling food, other looters are nothing but scum. If someone offers to guard your shopping trolley of PlayStations while you get some trainers, politely decline.

Remember it’s not panic buying

When you’re looting, don’t follow the herd with their inexplicable fixation on toilet roll. Steal classy items like legs of lamb and packs of 200 fags and leave the bog paper to the riff-raff.

Don’t loot on an empty stomach

Otherwise you’ll come away with bags full of quiche, cocktail sausages and crisps worth barely £20 when you should have been grabbing electrical goods. Have a snack before you go looting, or start slightly earlier and loot a Boots meal deal first.

Watch out for the army

The army may be ordered to shoot looters on sight but let’s face it, Britain’s armed forces are so run-down there’ll only be a handful of teenage squaddies with a few bullets each. Just run for it with your trolley of Lush bath bombs.

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Oh shit, I might not be Churchill after all

by Boris Johnson, prime minister of the United Kingdom

I HAVE always been a great admirer of Winston Churchill. I wrote a biography of him. I have considered myself his modern equivalent. I may have been wrong.

Because in this time of crisis, when the economy is on a war footing, I see myself on the television and see not a great, resolute statesman but the terrified, pisshole eyes of a cornered rodent.

I hear not a great orator capable of bringing a frightened and divided country together, but the empty bluster of a man out of his depth and desperately trying not to crack a gag.

Churchill was, of course, in his own time a controversial figure. He was a Tory that joined the Whigs, he was blamed for causing a recession, and a few other things. But when the hour came, so did the man.

He wouldn’t, I feel sadly sure, have seen that hour come and been upstaged by a boy chancellor offering nothing more than an extra-large package of payday loans to businesses. But that, regrettably, was what I saw last night.

I honestly thought I’d rise to the occasion. I thought the whole tousle-haired clown thing was an act concealing the steely statesman within. But it seems it’s clown all the way through this particular stick of rock.

So I’m not Churchill, it turns out. Easy mistake to make. I’ll just have to settle for that great leader who came a creditable third in WWII instead. They called Mussolini a clown too, you know.

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