A no-deal Brexit is a life and death situation for me

It's me and the millions of other British citizens who have diabetes, epilepsy or other long-term medical conditions who are slated to end up in Boris Johnson's oft-quoted ditch

An outpouring of jokes at the expense of the "Bo-zo" in Number 10 accompanied the EU’s grant of a Brexit extension. It was no more than Boris Johnson, who’d promised to "die in a ditch" rather than break his self-imposed deadline of October 31, deserved.

Personally, though, I found it hard to laugh too hard. Instead I celebrated the prime minister’s humiliation by sticking a needle into my guts and pushing the plunger. It was my personal gesture to the man a few tens of thousands of ageing Tory members put in charge of the country.

Can you blame me? Johnson’s “do or die” pledge called for people like me, who live with type one diabetes, to do the dying. We, and everyone else with long-term medical conditions were slated to end up in his oft quoted ditch. Fortunately, the EU has rather more humanity than Johnson; for at least the next three months, the 400,000 of us who acquired diabetes via an autoimmune disorder should be able to count on reliable supplies of imported insulin.

There will be no gummed-up ports. The creation of the world’s biggest lorry park in Kent is on hold. Handing a prescription to the pharmacist will involve a wait of maybe ten minutes as opposed to… well, nobody really knows. That’s the problem.

Another problem is that the threat remains, as Hugo Dixon, the deputy chair of the People’s Vote campaign, pointed out this week. So every time the needle pierces my skin to deliver the stuff that keeps me alive, there’ll be a frisson of fear.

The same applies to those among Britain’s 3 million or so type two diabetics who also require drugs. Ditto the 500,000 who have epilepsy, which is controlled by, drugs. Did you know that more than 360,000 new cases of cancer are diagnosed in Britain each year? Guess what treating them requires.

These are just a few examples. According to healthcare charity the King’s Fund, there are 15 million people in the UK with some sort of long-term health condition.

I know what you're saying: don't worry, the government is stockpiling. But if you trust the government, and in particular, this government, to get that right given its record on big projects, then you’re shockingly naive. Put “universal credit” into Google, for example, and look at what was said about it. Then look at what we’ve ended up with. Nothing this government says can be relied upon.

The impact of Brexit on us, or at least a no-deal Brexit, occasionally gets discussed by the UK media but rarely in great depth as the interminable manoeuvrings at Westminster continue.

No doubt there’ll be some wombat in the prime minister’s office who’ll say that if MPs would just back his putrid deal we’d be able to move on to the BoZo’s priorities for Britain, which appear to involve screwing it up and then dismembering it.

Theresa May said much the same thing about her slightly less rotten offer, although comparing one to the other is like comparing a plate full of rotting meat with a bowl of month-old mussels harvested from the rocks near a chemical plant.

May’s deal would have cost Britain billions; Johnson’s will cost still more if he can find a way to force it through.

A no-deal Brexit would risk lives on day one because of the walls Johnson and his friends want to throw up around Britain en route to turning us into some sort of foggy Singapore, a damp playground for the casino capitalists who fill Tory coffers and get to eat rubber chicken with ministers at the repulsive events they hold to say thanks.

But their alternatives aren’t much better. The impact on the NHS that supplies the medication 15m Britons rely upon hardly bears thinking about, and that’s assuming it doesn’t get broken up and sold off by a future Conservative administration. Which isn’t a credible assumption.

No, Johnson’s “deal” is just another con, one in a long line of them.

The best option for those of us with medical issues is remaining in the EU with the agreement we currently have, which is far superior to anything he, Theresa May, or anyone else has come up with.

That would require a referendum first, I recognise that. Those who, like Dixon, are campaigning for one really need to draw a line under the recent bout of infighting and get their acts together.

This isn’t a game. For millions of us, it’s a life and death struggle. The stakes couldn’t be any higher.