No, not the police, but the Office, which I wrote about last week. Here are a couple of other perspectives: from Christopher Booker, and from The Conversation, which a colleague in New Zealand alerted me to. Oddly, I did not know about this, despite its London news base.
Booker makes his usual climate change point, and thinks that we may not notice much difference as whoever gets the contract will have to use Met Office weather station data to get valid UK-wide forecasts. The Conversation also wonders if we will notice any change, but clearly thinks that the divorce is a loss for the UK as a whole. It also wonders whether the BBC has confused the best value with the merely cheap. It would not be the first to do that!
And it is certainly a cheap way for the BBC to land a blow on the government in what will surely become a nasty scrap over money, independence, virtue and value.
Here's a link to a previous Conversation piece on the Met Office, the BBC and climate change – from August 2015. Meanwhile, it keeps raining as forecast in that quintessential piece of weather lore by Flanders and Swann:
In July the sun is hot.
Is it shining; no it's not.
August cold and dank and wet,
Brings more rain than any yet.
You can hear it all here. In the F&S view, it gets no better in September.
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