The Met Office has a supercomputer and for five days now the boffins have been predicting a hurricane would envelop much of Britain.
That led train companies and airports to shut down stuff just in case the Met Office was right this time round. It follows a SNAFU in 1987 when Michael Fish played down tales of a disastrous gale just hours ahead of a disastrous gale knocking down trees and shutting down vast tracts of England.
The cost to the British economy of the Cassandra like warnings of gloom and doom have yet to be measured. But commuters trying to get to work this morning in the south east are hanging around waiting for the weather to abate, although vast tracts of the south east haven’t experienced very much more than leaves on the line. The death toll from “Hurricane St Jude” hasn’t yet been totted up.
The BBC was on high alert and it is true that wind speeds reached 99MPH close to the Isle of Wight.
The Met Office will spend most of today trying to downplay the weather map it issued showing the whole of southern England was under threat.
