If you want to calibrate modern British culture, look no further than the weather forecast. On Good Friday evening, after the 10 o’clock news, the BBC forecaster appeared in the guise of an anxious dispatch manager who had failed to deliver a premium order. “It’s a fairly cold old do,” he said apologetically.

Which, roughly translated, meant: “Crikey, real disaster, folks. We know you requested four days of lovely hot, sunny weather to allow you to have that Easter barbecue, but we’re afraid there’s been a terrible mix-up and instead you’ve got horrid cold northerly winds and the threat of nasty snow driving ever southwards, with a covering of several centimetres expected in large parts of northern and eastern England.”

As if that wasn’t enough, with a proud flourish the poor chap then presented the “Feels Like” index, the BBC forecasters’ latest asinine tool for telling the nation that, although the temperature was hovering around freezing, it would in fact “feel like” -2C or -3C in the strong winds.

The Feels Like index – which scientifically is nonsense, since temperatures are only part of the climate equation – first appeared a few months ago, and immediately struck me as so laughable that I assumed it would be killed off.

But seemingly not. Apparently the cognitive powers of the British public have diminished to the point where, when it comes to weather, they must be treated like the most backward class of primary school children.

It is no longer enough that forecasts are devoid of anything resembling science; now they must be antithetic to it. Speaking personally, it Feels Like we are being terminally patronised, a feeling confirmed on the Saturday night when the forecaster told us the weather “might well have given us the chance to build a snowman”. More usefully, he could have pointed out that not that long ago white Easters were almost as common as white Christmases.

Weather reporting, for all it has hugely increased in accuracy, has been deliberately infected with an extraordinary degree of subjectivity. Forecasters interpret the weather for its presumed emotional impact upon us. It’s a soap opera; no more, no less. Sun equals good. Rain equals bad. Cold or damp is negative; warm or dry is positive.

Talk to meteorologists who are long in the tooth – the same ones who come close to weeping when you mention the Feels Like index – and they will tell you that it was about ten or 12 years ago that the dreaded directive came from the Met Office telling them they must start talking about the impact of the weather on people. But the minute they started to do this, they lost objectivity. They had begun the fatal process of making huge assumptions about our attitudes.

And that’s the catastrophic flaw. In the process of making the weather idiot-proof and accessible, forecasters effectively homogenised their target audience into a class of urban couch potatoes who didn’t want to experience climate in any shape or form. These were people who sought a Disneyesque world of perpetual sunshine, untarnished by wicked rain, wind, ice or snow.

Forecasts, ever since, have been tailored to meet the aspirations of this shallow Everyman. They highlight the chances of good weather at weekends, as if it is an entitlement. They emphasise the sunshine in the South East, as if those who live there have the right to it all the time. They prioritise car travel, because anything that slows down Everyman on the road is a disaster.

Often, under duress, forecasters have to service these myths. Thus they utter meaningless statements such as “It will be grotty today” (John Humphrys pulled up that particular unfortunate) or “temperatures are respectable for the time of year”.

What on earth does respectable mean? That it’s warm enough to go to church?

I don’t need to tell you that this kind of populism is intellectually bankrupt. Day in, day out, forecasters perpetuate the view that warm winters are a good thing, even as we face unprecedented climate change. It is now two years since temperatures for any month fell below the average.

On the same logical basis, what may be a good day for Wimbledon is dreadful for an East Anglian farmer battling drought, or for Britain’s millions of hay fever sufferers. In April last year, when there was a lengthy dry spell, and the news bulletins reported dried-up reservoirs, forecasters, on behalf of dratted Everyman, welcomed the fact that nice weather was to continue.

Another example. When the news reported how a cold spell was needed to kill off the midges that carry bluetongue, the animal disease, a forecaster popped up to give a gloomy warning about a nasty frost.

But the Feels Like index and all it stands for, in a funny way, is about far more than just the weather. It says so much about us, defining an affluent society that believes that just as it can buy what it wants in terms of smart kitchens and BMWs, so it should be able to control the weather. Cocooned in air-conditioned houses and cars, people are inactive and increasingly insulated from real climate of any kind.

With affluence comes other delusions. We don’t wear appropriate clothing for the weather any more, because we want to look fashionable. In Russia, by contrast, there’s no such thing as cold weather; they just wear more clothes.

And so how we regard the weather symbolises deeper trends – a move away from the individual; the move towards the dominant culture of managerialism. It emphasises the power of urban society over rural – those who regard rain as bad probably don’t know or care where their meat comes from.

For me, this was a magical Easter. Yesterday, in bright sunshine, but with the breath of the Arctic in my face, I went for a long horse ride, garlanded by snowflakes falling from an entirely clear blue sky. On my Feels Like index, it was pretty close to heaven.

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