The British are famed for making small talk about the weather. Now it’s time for some rather more consequential discussions. Andy Burnham, ever the metro mayor, has called a Cobra meeting to plan for the current emergency and, no doubt, show that he is alive to the public’s concern about the continuing drought.
In fact, the heatwave has been going on for so long, virtually uninterrupted, that it’s easily forgotten that it was the previous prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, who convened a weather-based Cobra first, when the Met Office issued its first red alerts in late June. Since then, of course, there has been no let-up, and the global consequences of climate change have been brought home with all the power that our damaged ecosystem possesses.
