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Theresa Coffey blamed the wrong sort of rain for the Storm Babet chaos – 17 hurricane force comebacks

John Plunkett. Updated October 25th, 2023

Environment secretary Theresa Coffey – no, stick with us, please – has been before MPs attempting to defend the country’s apparently pisspoor preparations for dealing with the flooding brought on by Storm Babet.

You know, the storm that is thought to have left at least seven people dead, left hundreds homeless and flooded around 1,250 properties in England.

And Coffey’s top line excuse appeared to be – no laughing at the back – that it was the wrong kind of rain.

Watch this.

“One of the things that happened particularly with Storm Babet is that we are very good with the Met Office and the Environment Agency’s flood forecasting at predicting weather normally because most of our rain tends to come in from the west. We’ve got that pretty much down to a fine art.

“This was rain coming from the other way and we don’t have quite as much experience on that.

“Therefore our accuracy of predicting where such heavy rain would fall was not to the same degree as if it had been.”

And it prompted no end of responses, as you might imagine, and these people surely said it best.

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