On Wednesday, Lord Lawson a former Conservative chancellor who regularly casts doubt on climate science, also criticised suggestions of a link between the floods and global warming as absurd.

He said: "You'll see the Met Office's own report denies it. It is just this Julia Slingo woman who made this absurd statement, but their own official statement makes it clear there is no proven link whatsoever.

"There's been bad weather before. And anyhow, climate change is a global phenomenon, and you don't attribute local things like this necessarily to some global picture."