It was a wet and windy Tuesday when I pulled on my Wellington boots and headed off to meet the Silent Legion.

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If you hadn't known it was there that day, you would have driven straight past it. Tucked away in the corner of a public campsite on the Leicestershire and Warwickshire border, little suggested anything particularly remarkable was going on.

But step inside their operations tent and the picture changes. Computers are running, radios are playing, and there is enough technology, paperwork and planning to suggest that, whatever disruption might come our way, these people have given serious thought to what happens next.

I'm joining six or seven members of the organisation, all volunteers who fund their work from their own pockets and through sales of their merchandise.

They're proud of what they've achieved, including establishing Silent Legion branches overseas, in the United States and elsewhere. But there's one thing they want to make clear from the outset: they hate the term 'preppers'.

They feel the word has been hijacked by those who take preparedness to extremes, leaving anyone who uses it at risk of being lumped in with people wearing tin foil hats and building underground bunkers.

The people I met were decidedly not the caricature the word might conjure up.

They were enthusiastic, committed and keen to show me what they do. And they were equally keen to explain what they don't do. They're not preparing for a nuclear bomb or planning to fend off air strikes from Iran or Russia. Their focus is much closer to home: cyber attacks, severe storms, flooding and the kind of disruption that could leave ordinary people without the services they rely on every day.

Their idea is to create what amounts to a temporary second village for when a community is hit by disaster. They showed me AI-generated images illustrating how such an operation might work, along with plans for communicating when mobile phone masts go down and the usual lines of communication are lost.

The paperwork alone gives you an idea of how seriously they take the task.

Inside what is essentially a four-person tent, files are piled high, along with computers and ham radios. Their........

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