Why this summer time’s been a proper Royal washout

The contract between an Englishman and his country states that he must endure nine months of grey skies and drizzle, to be rewarded with three months of sumptuous summer.

And it’s a price worth paying.

For England in bloom is like nowhere else on Earth: picnics in the park, village cricket on the common and dragonflies darting over streams.

‘Summer afternoon,’ wrote the inimitable 19th-century novelist Henry James, ‘to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.’

So who can blame the nation for feeling let down, put out, or just a little miffed by the non-appearance this year of that marvellous season.

For though we are already halfway through June — the first month of our meteorological summer — the mercury has stubbornly refused to climb much above the low teens.

From Scarborough to Southend-on-Sea, Brits should be basking on beaches in sandals and swimsuits by now. Instead, we’re wrapped up in woolly jumpers with scarves and cotton mittens.

True, it was not enough to dampen the excitement at the weekend over the Princess of Wales’s first public appearance since her cancer diagnosis. But the weather at Trooping The Colour in London was shocking.

Looking out from the Buckingham Palace balcony, Kate will have been confronted with a sea of umbrellas and cagoules as the crowds below battled with bone-chilling squalls and heavy showers.

Those Royal fans will not have been the only ones throwing their arms aloft and crying out: Where’s our summer? ‘The heating goes off in April and shouldn’t be back on until October,’ one elderly neighbour told me. ‘But I can barely feel my toes!’ Another wailed that she’s still sleeping in flannel sheets.

Spring was a washout. April alone saw 111.4mm of rain, compared to a monthly average of 71.9mm. And although June has been a little drier, it’s still perishing.

Many now fear that the summer of 2024 could be a total write-off. LBC radio claimed we were set for ‘50 days of rain’ over what could be the wettest summer since 1912, when there were 55 days of rain. The contrast with last year could not be greater. This time 12 months ago, Britain was in the midst of a heatwave. On June 11, 2023, London bathed in 32-degree heat. And for a balmy fortnight, temperatures didn’t drop below 25 degrees. It was also remarkably dry — Manston in Kent went 33 days straight without rainfall.

So, as we all refrained from using our hosepipes — lest a snooping neighbour reported us to the water authorities (who despite their dictates on saving water continued to illegally pump sewage into our rivers) — no one could have imagined June 2024 would be quite so desperate.

Halfway through June and there has been over 130 ground frosts, whereas last year there was just 143 for the entire month.

‘It has been a cold start to the summer,’ admitted Tom Morgan, a senior meteorologist with the Met Office, who added, despite Saturday’s downpours: ‘The last few weeks have been dry — but certainly chilly.’ Meanwhile, Dr Rob Thompson, a meteorologist at the University of Reading, told the Mail that the first ten days of June were the coldest recorded at his institution’s observatory for a decade — largely due to cooler overnight temperatures driving down the 24-hour average. Furthermore, the first third of the month was 1.9 degrees cooler than the average over the same period since 1991.

Mr Morgan said there were two reasons why temperatures are marginally down this month: the positioning of the jet stream and Arctic winds.

The jet stream is the name given to the 100mph winds blowing west to east roughly six miles above the Atlantic Ocean, and greatly influencing the weather we experience across Europe. It typically flows in a relatively straight line. However, it is prone to buckling, rather like the meandering of a river, or — as Tom Morgan suggests — like a slithering snake, creating peaks and troughs. Its current shape has a substantial kink in it, sending chilly Arctic winds from around Greenland towards Britain. This explains the cooler weather over the past two weeks.

And yet, Mr Morgan said there’s nothing very much out of the ordinary with this year’s summer weather. ‘The problem is, people have become accustomed to unusually warm weather in June over recent years,’ he explained. ‘So, the public perceive this year to be worse than usual, when really it’s pretty normal.’

Dr Rob Thompson agrees, adding: ‘Ultimately, people are getting used to climate change.’

As for ground frosts in June, it emerges that there were an astonishing 600 recorded in the summer of 2015. And where those predictions of 50 days of rain are concerned, Dr Thompson acknowledged that it’s a fool’s game to predict the weather with any sort of certainty more than a week in advance. But the good news is that he expects warmer weather to arrive this week.

The Ventusky meteorological website, meanwhile, has temperatures reaching close to 30c in the south of England by the end of the month. And James Madden, forecaster for Exacta Weather, went further, warning of an ‘exceptionally hot July, with the high possibility of some sort of mega or super heatwave’.

Parts of Europe are experiencing their own heatwave, with central and southern Greece reaching 40c, twice prompting the early closure of the Acropolis in Athens to prevent a potential heatstroke catastrophe among the throng of tourists. Similar baking temperatures have cropped up in Turkey ad Cyprus.

Whatever happens here this summer, it is most unlikely we are set for a repeat of 1816 and the so-called ‘summer that never was’. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before had spewed ash high into the atmosphere, which settled into great clouds across the northern hemisphere. Crops failed and thousands were plunged into food poverty. July 1816 remains the coldest on record, and the entire summer was a write-off.

This week’s warmer weather will come as a great relief to today’s British farmers for whom cold, wet weather can all-too often spell disaster and lead to financial ruin. As it will to our hospitality and entertainments industry as it continues to dust down from the financial squeeze of the Pandemic. Events such as Wimbledon, Glastonbury and the domestic cricket season are all a major boost to British morale — and the national economy.

It is important to remember that, although the British weather is perennially unpredictable, the trend over the years is that it is warming up. Indeed, May 2024 was actually the UK’s hottest since records began in 1884, beating the previous record, for May 2018, by a whole degree.

In other words, it won’t be long, Britain. So put the rosé on ice, pack up your beach bag and parasol, and grab the factor 50. The Great British summer is just around the corner.