Now prisoners called on to fix food shortages and make Brexit great again!

Imagine ‘prisoners will be needed to ease labour shortages in food industry’ on a Brexit bus. But it’s happening as the UK’s chronic labour shortages start to bite, forcing restaurants to close and threatening the economic recovery, writes James Moore

Feel like chicken tonight? Supply shortages have forced restaurants to close and led to empty supermarket shelves (PA)

EU workers are processing and delivering all our food. Let’s put Britain first and have Norman Stanley Fletcher, Lennie Godber and their HM Prison Slade pals doing the jobs instead!

It’s a bit long for a slogan, I know. But there ought to be just about enough room to fit it on a big red bus. How d’you think that would go down?

Of course, there’s a difference between the one I’m proposing and the one Boris Johnson actually put out on the roads during the Brexit campaign. I am, of course, talking about the one which juiced Britain’s net budget payments to the EU, ignoring the rebate and suchlike. And which promised an NHS dividend. Wait, whatever happened to that? If you’ll forgive the use of the fictional characters from the BBC’s classic comedy series Porridge, mine is more honest. I’m unlikely to end up getting told off by the Office for National Statistics.