Always check the small print. When the Environment Agency described the 2005 floods as “the worst in a lifetime”, the government would have done well to make sure just whose lifetime it was referring to: a human or a ferret. These things, like ferrets when they are alive, come back to bite you.
It was sod’s law that on the very day the prime minister had summoned the media to a school in Burton upon Trent to boast about how well his government was delivering on its responsibilities, he was forced into a reverse-ferret over flood defences. “We set out in the autumn statement a historic six-year funding deal with record sums going into flood defences,” he said gamely, as if the mere fact that he had planned to spend all this money should have been enough to stop the flood waters rising.
Given a bit more time, Dave might well have tied himself in knots by claiming the reason the floods had been so bad was precisely because the defences had been so good. Fortunately for him, he was floated off to Cumbria in the nick of time to be photographed next to some inadequate flood defences.
With large parts of Cumbria and Lancashire under water, it was left to the environment minister, Liz Truss, to hold the ship in Westminster. “The floods have been unprecedented,” she said, her finger moving across the page as she read out her statement to an almost empty House of Commons. Those MPs with constituencies in flood-affected areas were up there getting stuck in with waders and sandbags; the rest weren’t particularly bothered.
“The floods have been unprecedented,” she repeated in the same deathly monotone as before. For emphasis. If you could make the floods recede through a boredom-induced coma, Truss would have turned Cumbria into a desert within minutes. Unprecedented, it turned out, was government shorthand for not having thought of something it might have done before.
During the 2005 floods, the water in Keswick had risen half a metre higher than the previous high water mark of 1853, Truss said. From this she had, quite reasonably in her opinion, inferred that the waters could never possibly get as high again. In Trussland, no records are ever broken: every day is much the same as her delivery. Flat-lining. Imagine her total surprise, then, when Storm Desmond upped the ante by adding another half metre to the previous high water mark.
“Unprecedented,” she said, yet again, before going on to report that she had personally headed up a Cobra meeting and spoken to the Gold commanders on the ground. It sounded as if she was treating the floods as an act of terrorism and that when she, too, headed north to get in the way of the rescue services later in the day she’d do her bit by shouting, “Oi, Desmond. You ain’t no Muslim, bruv.”
But then Kerry McCarthy, Labour’s shadow environment secretary, doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence either. Every time she gets to the despatch box she looks a bundle of nerves. Don’t panic, don’t panic. She started well enough by pointing out David Cameron had only last year said money would be no object when it comes to flood defences – when will he learn not to make promises he can’t keep? – but by the time she had got round to suggesting that Saucy Santa (“We’ve got to act before Christmas strikes”) was as big a natural hazard as Dirty Des, she had rather got washed away. Cumbria can put that down as another near miss.
