PMQs sketch: Floods dominated everything

Wellies off, gloves on. The party leaders greeted each other with forced displays of warmth and mutual esteem today. Outside, the gusts blew, the rivers rose and the heavens wept.

Floods dominated everything.

The PM has spent so much time with emergency committees that he’s adopted their can-do battlefield vocabulary. He talked of ‘Gold Commanders calling on military assets’ which is butch-speak for ‘squaddies with shovels being shouted at by Ruperts.’ Having sploshed around for ten days with flow-rate experts and sandbank architects he is also a world authority on flood management. The Thames, he declared, with Michael Fish-like gravity, ‘is expected to reach a second peak on Sunday or Monday.’ He also estimated the weight of all the water on the Somerset Levels: 65 million tons, (sounds a bit light to me).

Miliband was tempted to make political capital from the crisis. Yesterday Cameron vowed that ‘money is no object’ so Miliband asked if the bottomless pit could stretch to the reinstatement of 550 flood specialists threatened with redundancy by the Environment Agency.