LET’S get this straight from the start: no one has a bad word to say about those hard-working Environment Agency staff who have been toiling all hours on the rain-sodden ground to try and ensure that people in Somerset and elsewhere don’t actually drown due to government incompetence.

What they ARE saying is that Lord Chris ‘Canute’ Smith who heads up the organisation and the hapless Environment Secretary Owen ‘Kill the badgers’ Patterson should take a long walk off a short pier.

Neither of these men look as if they know the difference between a badger and a flood or, indeed, their backside from their elbow.

Loads of people who do know about these things told them to dredge the rivers. They didn’t.

Loads of people told them not to cut budgets for the Environment Agency and squander thousands trying to kill badgers. They did.

You’d think, after they singularly failed to do anything useful for nearly two months, they do the decent thing or apologise profusely now. But no.

Patterson wimps off to have an eye operation. And Smith says it’s the victims’ fault for living on flood plains.

“Anyone who builds in a flood plain, anyone who buys a property in a flood plain, needs to think about the flood risk.’ he intones.

HOW DARE HE?

It was HIS government that secretly allowed two million more people into Britain so that we had no choice but to build houses in stupid places to keep them safe.

It was his government that began the practice of fleecing the British public of billions in so-called ‘green’ taxes which, it would appear, have does little to avoid this flooding disaster.

And when Lord Snooty finally did appear in public at the end of last week, he gave the impression that the whole thing was a nuisance, and the people who are suffering most were vile and a hindrance.

If this was America we would have been able to declare a state of emergency.

Then access to agreed funding and military help would have kicked in weeks back.

Unfortunately, we’re the UK, where London-based politicians are increasingly and massively disconnected from the rest of the nation; geographically, socially and financially.

And if they do, finally, seem to look worried for the cameras it’s because they realise we’re on to them.