Our leaders tread water over global warming

I stayed in London, watching politicians on the rolling news up to their mouths in raw sewage, which they vainly attempt to stem with sandbags full of rhetoric. David Cameron in Witney, Oxfordshire, the worst-affected part of his constituency, seized the day to pour his tepid scorn on Government preparedness.

Meanwhile, Hilary Benn swam to the surface of Worcester to rebut the claim that the Environment Agency's budget for flood defences had been cut last year. Then, yesterday, the Great Helmsman finally appeared: Gordo himself.

Perhaps wisely, the Prime Minister didn't take to the flood waters himself.

He's no Gerhard Schröder, whose splashing about during the 2005 German floods was credited with restoring his image as the Captain of the Fatherland. Instead, Gordo performed his usual "I'm too serious for my office" shtick, and ensured there were only dry eyes in

Sarf the drenched houses. Whatever the situation on the sodden ground, we don't need a public inquiry to tell us that the determination to indulge in political point-scoring remains in full spate.

It's all very well for Hilary Benn to say: "We just have to recognise the intensity of the volume of water that's come down and that has resulted in f looding that even with the best defences in the world would in some cases have been overtopped." But what he dare not do is join the dots so that Middle England has to look upon the waters of the deep, and face up to the change in our climate and its disastrous results.

We have ceased to be a country where our temperate climate is matched only by our equanimity of character. Gone are the days when we could lightly mock our light

London tributes rains and dull skies: the past few years have made it abundantly clear that we're living in the era when extreme weather events take their holidays here. And that shows up the vulnerability of our modern, high-tech country and our ability to deal (or not) with the consequences of extremity.

The Government doesn't want to connect the floods to global warming tributes to the dead for fear of being exposed in the itsy-bitsy bikini of its own halfhearted environmental policy.

Instead, we're doomed to more building of new homes on flood plains, higher insurance premiums and a steady drift of politicians struggling to keep afloat in midstream who continue to think it's only après them that the deluge will really get bad..