Pipe down, mudslingers. It was Frank, not Phil, that soaked the north

As the north of England gradually sank beneath the swirling brown torrent, we learned that Sir Philip Dilley, the boss of the Environment Agency, and therefore the man responsible for the nation’s flood defences, was sunning himself in Barbados.

Naturally, we were invited to sneer at this ne’er-do-well who takes our money to do a job and then buggers off to the Caribbean whenever the weather turns iffy.

But hang on a minute: let’s just say for the moment that Sir Dilley had cancelled his winter-holiday plans. Let’s say that, instead of heading for Gatwick to board a plane to Barbados, he’d got on a train and headed instead for Carlisle. What difference would that have made?

The rain would still have fallen. The rivers would still have burst their banks. A thousand DFS sofas would still have been ruined. And Robert Hall would still have been on the news every night, in his logo-less wellies, telling us about northern grit.

When it became obvious that a street was in danger of being submerged, did the shopkeepers stand quivering in their store rooms saying, ‘We have no idea what to do. If only the boss of the Environment Agency was here to offer some kind of guidance’?

When that bus became trapped in the torrent, did the fire brigade rush about in panicky circles, waving their arms in the air, saying, ‘Everyone onboard will surely die because Sir Dilley is not here to tell us how to inflate our dinghies’?

Actually, I should imagine that the people on the ground were quite grateful that he was in Barbados, because if he’d turned up in his gabardine, and his new Christmas jumper, they’d have had to stop rescuing people and make him a cup of tea.

We saw this with David Cameron. He was in flood-hit towns, shaking hands with various flood-relief workers, who, because they were shaking hands with the prime minister, were not doing any actual flood-relief work.

It’s therefore better that politicians and civil servants stay away whenever the weather girds its loins. Their job is to sit down after the flood waters have gone away and the DFS sofas have been replaced to work out how best such problems can be prevented in future.

For evidence of this you need look no further than the Lake District when the first storm came roiling in from the west. I can’t remember its name. Eunice, probably. Or Brian. Whatever, a local engineering company immediately dispatched its men and its heavy equipment to solve the problem, which they did in short order.

A couple of days later the town was threatened once more, but this time the boss of the local engineering company was told by police chiefs obsessed with health and safety that it was too dangerous for his men to work. So, because these police chiefs were on the ground, and not on holiday in Barbados, thousands of people spent their Christmas scraping raw sewage from their plug sockets and cooking their turkeys with a candle.

Exactly the same thing happened again this week when Storm Frank came barrelling over the Pennines. Homeowners were told to stop protecting their property with sandbags and leave the area immediately. The chief constables were running around as if a giant meteorite was on its way. ‘There is a danger to life,’ they shrieked.

This is the first thing Sir Dilley should do. Tomorrow morning he should hold a meeting in his office with various people from the police and the Met Office. And he should tell them in a special stern voice that in future they’ve got to calm down and stop pretending that above-average rainfall is an extinction-level event.

Afterwards he should ask local councils if they’d offer grants to any homeowner who’s put decking over their back garden and turned their front lawn into a car park if they’d put it all back as it was, to give the rainwater a chance to soak away before it gets to the greengrocer’s.

Sadly, though, Sir Dilley will not be able to take any of these practical steps because on Monday he will almost certainly be in a headhunter’s office, having lost what the Daily Mail calls his ‘£100,000-a-year, three-day-a-week cushy number at the Environment Agency’.

This, I think, is actually the biggest problem facing Britain today. Whenever a problem arises, the boss is invariably blamed and then sacked before he has a chance to make sure it doesn’t arise again.

It’s all rooted in a disease that causes rational people to hate anyone who is moderately successful or lucky or beautiful. We’re invited to rejoice if we see a spot of cellulite on Kate Moss’s thighs. We are encouraged to laugh openly if a lottery winner loses his fortune in some way. And we are invited to sneer if a politician has the temerity to go on a foreign holiday.

You may be aware of the ‘Rich Kids of Instagram’ feed. It’s a place where children of the well-off post photographs of themselves drinking champagne and wearing watches the size of a medium-sized tortoise. If I were a teenager and I looked at all those pictures, I’d be inspired to get a good job and work hard. But no. Instead of thinking, ‘One day I shall be able to provide all that,’ the disease makes us think, ‘Right. What can I do to make sure they lose their watches and their champagne?’

In short: money, if you’ve earned it, is bad enough; but money, if you haven’t, is unforgiveable.

All of which means that just a day after Sir Dilley got back from his holiday in Barbados, he was described on his Wikipedia page as an ‘upper-class twerp’.

He certainly isn’t a twerp, because he gained a first-class honours degree in civil engineering. And I’m not sure about the upper-class bit either, because his only political contribution has been £2,000. To the Scottish Labour Party.

All I do know is that we pay him to do a job. And now we must leave him alone so that he can get on and do it.

3 January 2016