My cool and calm surgeon husband came home from work one day and said we should think about prepping. Now I – a mother-of-four and ex-No10 speechwriter – have turned my garden shed into a fully stocked survival bunker

In the Pacific, temperatures are rising, with the strongest El Nino on record threatening extreme weather around the world. In the skies over the Baltic, military drone incursions are increasingly common. Underneath a remote mountain in the Urals, a vast secret underground bunker has been located, from which Russia could launch nuclear strikes on the West.

And in a suburb of South-West England, a woman stacks tins of chickpeas in her shed.

Correction: This is no mere shed. It is a fully equipped survival bunker, an uber‑larder replete with enough water, food and kit to keep my family of six going for at least a couple of weeks.

I had long thought those who prepared for disaster were a couple of litres short of a jerry can; the type whose bookshelves might contain the well-thumbed works of conspiracy theorists such as David Icke.

‘Prepper’ conjures images of American hillbilly families with a tattered Confederate flag on the pick-up or Britons playing survival games dressed in commando gear from the local Army surplus. In contrast, I am a middle-class mother of four, formerly employed as a speechwriter at Number 10. But a prepper I have become.

It began a month or so ago when my husband called the domestic equivalent of a COBRA meeting and said he thought we should stockpile a few items to be on the safe side.

Mother-of-four Clare Foges in the garden shed she’s turned into a fully stocked survival bunker

This was surprising. He is an NHS surgeon; cool, calm and collected, not prone to paranoia. But conversations with friends and colleagues have convinced him that something might well hit the fan in the months to come.

I muttered that I’d bung some extra tins in the trolley next time I was at the supermarket and thought little more of it.

But then, throughout September, came ominous headline after ominous headline, regular as a drumbeat. Thump: A National Audit Office warning that climate change and cyberattacks pose a growing risk to food supply chains. Thump: Rogue drones have been targeting UK military bases almost daily. Thump: Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Richard Knighton says Britain is living through the ‘most dangerous’ period of his 35-year career. Thump: For the first time in decades, the Government is updating its ‘war book’, with all departments given until the end of this year to plan for how they might respond to a conflict.

The loudest drumbeat of all: Government advice to stockpile emergency items.

‘If you’ve got a store of a bit of food that can keep you going for a while before the emergency services can get to you, you’re going to be a lot better off than if you haven’t,’ said Environment Secretary Angela Eagle on September 4, anticipating the bludgeoning we’re going to get from El Nino this winter.

Defence Secretary Wes Streeting has instructed us to have ‘some cash at home… a supply of bottled water indoors… tinned goods’.

Clare’s cool and calm surgeon husband came home from work one day and said they should think about prepping

Clare has stocked around 50 tins, including tuna, corned beef, pears, peaches, prunes, pineapple, sweetcorn, carrots, cannellini beans and baked beans

This was formalised with the Government suggestion we all put together an emergency kit, to include a torch, portable power bank, wind-up radio, spare batteries and first-aid kit.

While the Government seems keen to keep this low-key – be ‘alert not alarmed’ says Streeting – as someone who worked in No10 communications for five years, I know that this advice will not have been issued lightly.

Words from Cabinet ministers’ lips can easily light the blue touch paper of panic-buying, as we saw with the Great Loo Roll Stampede of 2020. The fact such strong advice has been issued speaks volumes about the threats we really face.

The most predictable is the ‘Godzilla’ El Nino currently brewing in the Pacific, which is expected to bring exceptionally wet and wild weather towards the end of this year. Floods threaten six million properties in England alone.

The Russian menace is harder to predict. Last month, Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski warned that ‘Russia is preparing something big this year’.

One concerning development (of many) is that Russia’s Federal Security Service has imposed night-time curfews along its border with Estonia, raising fears of a land invasion of the Nato state.

The decision to stock up comes as the El Niño weather phenomenon is expected to bring wet and windy weather this autumn and early winter, with an increased likelihood of storms

Forecasters expect Super El Niño to peak in December and remain strong into the spring of next year; this is currently forecast to be the strongest El Niño on record

New Sky TV show The Wargame meanwhile simulates a Russian attack on UK soil, ballistic missiles raining down on London.

While The Wargame is frighteningly realistic, I am sceptical about a threat of this nature. After years of war and countless lives lost, Putin has only seized around 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory. Would even a madman like him start taking on the UK and the rest of Nato?

But if conventional war is not a realistic threat, severe disruption certainly is. Russia’s ‘grey zone’ attacks are increasingly audacious: covert submarine missions over cables in the North Sea; GPS jamming; drone incursions.

It is not hard to imagine a serious cyber incident interfering with electricity control systems, causing power outages which in turn affect water pumping, refrigeration, telecommunications and transport. A cascade of chaos leading to empty supermarket shelves, dry taps and blackouts.

It is this chaos that preppers fear – and our numbers are growing rapidly. The Start Prepping website, which advises newbies like me, saw readers increase by 702 per cent between July and September.

Russia’s threat to launch nuclear strikes on the West has also influenced the decision to start prepping (Pictured: a Russian strike on a residential building in northeastern Ukraine)

A similar site, UK Prepper Hub, has seen searches about emergency kit at more than 100 times their usual level. Its founder Darren Rhodes is keen to stress prepping isn’t about ‘survivalism’ – men smeared with combat paint living out their Mad Max fantasies – but ‘ordinary families who want to cope with a power cut, a storm or a water outage’.

Start Prepping founder Dan Goss echoes that view. ‘You can be more resilient, more prepared and more capable without becoming a bunker-dwelling radical.’

He tells me that ‘for a long time, the public have thought of prepping as something that ordinary people don’t do’ – but now attitudes are changing, fast. Including my own.

I have four young children aged eight, seven, five and two. We go through ungodly amounts of food on a daily basis. The idea of keeping this show on the road in the midst of a national disaster is nightmarish. So, like the best of Scouts, I vow we will Be Prepared.

For six people, I am going to need a lot of stuff – and thus a fair amount of space. The garden shed beckons, a dusty cavern crammed to the rafters with old paint tins and lawnmower parts. I set to work, using a discarded barbecue skewer to twirl away hundreds of cobwebs, in the manner of a candy floss maker.

An afternoon of hard graft, a trip to the dump and my bunker is ready for supplies. I make a couple of trips to Tesco, bunging sacks of rice and multipacks of water into the trolley. ‘Something big coming up?’ asks a cashier. Only Armageddon, sir.

It is advised to keep three litres of water per person, per day. I get in 60 litres, enough to cover us all for a few days. Plus six litres of UHT milk. For food, I have gone heavy on carbs: huge bags of rice and pasta, copious oats, cereals, canned potatoes. I stop short of powdered mash; the scars from eating Smash as a child remain, and not even the apocalypse would tempt me to eat it.

We also have around 50 tins: pears, peaches, prunes, pineapple, sweetcorn, carrots, cannellini beans and baked beans. Tuna and corned beef make the cut, spam doesn’t.

For treats we have sweets, chocolate spread, granulated coffee; my husband will have to make do without an espresso machine should crisis hit.

Though the likelihood of my children eating pasta and cannellini beans is slim, if push comes to shove, the food could last us at least two weeks.

Master prepper Darren Rhodes recommends we all have a cosy cupboard ‘full of blankets, spare duvets, hot-water bottles and other cosifying gear’. A cosy box is duly assembled – but how to heat the water for the hot-water bottles? I order a gas stove on Amazon, in addition to a wind-up radio (£23.99), water purification tablets (£12.62), torches (£7.64) and spare batteries (£12.92). All of this costs £85. Ker-ching for Mr Bezos.

As I paint a red cross on my first‑aid box, humming the theme tune to Dad’s Army, I realise that while bunker preparation is driven by serious concerns, it comes with a pleasurable side-order of nostalgia.

Those my age and above grew up revering the stoicism of the generations who lived through the Second World War. Does part of us long to demonstrate that we, too, can show the same grit under pressure? I refrain from decorating the bunker with a Keep Calm And Carry On poster.

Reactions to my prepping are not entirely positive. My mother is concerned I am becoming paranoid: what next, wrapping the TV in tin foil so that the extra-terrestrials cannot make contact?

One cynical friend thinks I’m falling for ‘Project Fear all over again’, recalling the words of journalist H. L. Mencken a century ago: ‘The whole aim of politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.’

On this basis I’m a sucker who has succumbed to government scaremongering.

Another friend suggests it’s rather selfish to stockpile; as bad as those who cleared shelves in the early days of Covid. This makes little sense to me, since surely it is better to build up supplies gradually rather than panic-buying when the fan gets hit?

Overall, though, the main reaction is to take the mickey: ‘I must put in a bulk order at Majestic before the Russkies make it to Tunbridge Wells.’

We are a nation that reveres not only humour but understatement in the face of crisis, from Captain Oates venturing outside the tent in a blizzard to his certain death – ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’ – to Londoners describing the Blitz as ‘a bit of bother’. It seems terribly un-British to be hysterical about potential threats, and for some, prepping falls into that bracket.

Meanwhile, in Europe, preparing for disaster is not just common sense but a civic duty.

The law in Finland states that large new developments must contain a reinforced nuclear bunker. There are tens of thousands of such bunkers available across Scandinavia. (In the unlikely event of nuclear attack here, we would head straight to my husband’s parents’ house in the countryside, where my mother-in-law has enough food in her garage to feed the five thousand.)

In America, 69 per cent of households have an emergency kit, compared to 19 per cent in the UK. Perhaps our relative complacency is down to our island mentality: we feel more untouchable than our continental cousins. But those who say ‘it won’t happen here’ ignore the fact that it very often has.

In the past seven years we have seen supermarkets introducing purchase limits on pasta, baked beans and other items during the pandemic; petrol forecourts emptied; ‘once-in-a-generation’ storms coming once a year; retail giants felled by cyberattackers. Unthinkable events have visited Britain before, and will do so again.

I hope that disaster doesn’t befall these islands in any way, shape or form, but it would be better if more people were prepared. Instead of its current softly-softly approach, the Government should be casting prepping as a patriotic duty, a way in which we can each bolster British resilience in dangerous and uncertain times. Your Country Needs You (to put aside some bottled water).

Alas, being prepared doesn’t come cheap; I have spent around £400 on supplies. But with long use-by dates, the money won’t go down the drain, since it can all be eaten and swapped for newer stuff once the end of the shelf-life nears. Indeed, perhaps the worst-case scenario isn’t a battering from El Nino, but weeks of kidney beans and rice on repeat.