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Prescott in full flood overwhelms hapless House

The deputy prime minister made a statement on the storm havoc yesterday. This is the man who, at the Labour party confererence, took credit for the weather. "No hosepipe bans!" he boasted.

Not yesterday. Only gentle summer rain, rain as warm and moist and welcome as a complimentary hot towelette, is brought to you by Labour governments. The disasters of this week are entirely due to Tory local authorities allowing houses to be built on flood plains. At last MPs have found a way of making the weather a party political issue. And they say the art of rhetoric is dead!

As usual the House faced the terrifying Prescott wall of words, which sweeps down on a community of MPs, ripping out arguments, tearing down questions, hurling debris round members' knees. Often the hapless victims have no warning of what's on the way. For example, as the Lib Dems' Don Foster pointed out, the prime minister's press spokesman, Alastair Campbell, had said on Monday that he didn't expect there to be any statement on this topic today.

At this, a freak surge burst the riverbank. Foaming and pounding, the deputy prime minister raged. "Can I tell him that I make statements when I make them to this House. Nobody else is responsible, I am responsible to this House, no parliamentary, no news spokesman, if I decide it is right to make a statement to this House, that's what I do, that's what I have done, and it didn't come from anybody else!"

A rant like that could carry a whole field full of livestock down the river. But suddenly there was one of those moments of calm, perhaps at the eye of the hurricane. After what seemed like an eternity - it was maybe two seconds - he said: "Oops, sorry Alastair" to delighted laughter.

But, as weathermen always say, there's more to come. "In regard to funding, of course we have increased in considerably during our own resources between the Maff and ourselves, there has been an increase and what worries me most is we tend to plan for circumstances which are a lot less than we should readily expect now, what we assume to be extreme circumstances are being built into the structures we have," he said, the water gushing out as from a broken fire hydrant. Hansard writers, the fourth emergency service, struggled valiantly to bring help where it was most needed, but even they were helpless against the tide.

Statistics came crashing past. He was asked about the increased house building in the south-east. But the point about a maelstrom is that it always swirls where it is least expected. Suddenly, he was talking about failed water pumping structures on the east coast rail route. "That was by alternative governments, so don't make that particular point, but we are now actually taking proper, putting the amount of resources and investment to move what we call extreme conditions which we must now regard as normal ...

"The Serplan [south-east regional plan] demand for housing was 33,000, I think when Professor Cope came along he suggested it was 55,000, we suggested that we would be 43,000 and the present building is about 39!"

This torrent brought misery and despair to the peaceful folk of the Conservative party who can have had no idea of the devastation about to be visited upon them. Tragically they only had their environment spokesman, Archie Norman, to stem the deluge - the equivalent of trying to dam a swollen river with a whoopee cushion.

Mr Prescott suddenly finished, and as I left I could see blank-eyed Tories wandering dazedly around, trying to put back together the fragments of their lives.

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