It's no surprise Britain can't cope with snow

If you’ve managed to avoid the dimly-lit pictures of people’s back gardens, count yourself lucky. Yes: snow has arrived in the capital. The Foreign Secretary made a point of thanking London-based diplomats for showing up to his speech in Westminster yesterday – or, as he put it, ‘battling through’ two or three inches of snow to get there. James Cleverly had a point: St James’s Park next door was a veritable winter wonderland; Whitehall was now clear, but had received a generous covering of the white stuff the evening before, while the capital’s transport was as disrupted as it inevitably is during a ‘snow event’. This morning, the snow continues to cause chaos.

For readers outside London, let me apologise. Full-blown blizzards may be fairly regular visitors to the Scottish Highlands or the Welsh mountains between late November and early March, and we may all hear periodic warnings that the trans-Pennine motorway or the Snake Pass in the Derbyshire Peak District is impassable, but it is only when actual flakes fall in the vicinity of Trafalgar Square that snow becomes national news.