JOHN PRESCOTT seems to have taken it upon himself to be the Minister for Disasters and, it must be said, this seems appropriate on several levels.

But if you have to have a politician at such things, then Mr Prescott is the one to have. He comes, he sees, he praises, he leaves. As he explained yesterday, he didn’t make too big a deal of his visit to the fire on Sunday because he did not want the emergency services attending him instead of the fire.

Exactly so. In the same way, Mr Prescott came to the House with almost no actual information and yet we were all grateful to him. It is often when politicians have very few facts that they are at their best. If you want to know what Mr Prescott is for — and at times this question occupies MPs for long periods — then he is for days like yesterday. There is no one more Mr Punch than Mr Prescott and yet, on such occasions, he turns into an emollient and steady figure.

There are all sorts of questions about the fire, almost none of which could be answered. Mr Prescott tried to take it slowly and there were very few linguistic incidents.

The plume was not toxic, he said, adding that it was made up of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and hydrocardigans. Surely this is an improvement on hydrocarbons. It makes them seem a lot friendlier. The world cannot help but be a nicer place with hydrocardigans in it.

There was another molecular incident involving Sarah Teather, the extremely short and rather intense Liberal Democrat. The problem for the Liberal Democrats is that they cannot stop themselves letting us how much they know. So, obviously, Ms Teather could not just ask about the plume. Oh no. Instead, she wanted to know about the impact of polycystic hydroaromatic hydrocarbons. This had the Hansard reporters snorting.

As she said this I saw Mr Prescott scribble something down on his notepad and wondered what it could possibly be. For most of us, it would have been: hydroaromatic — crispy duck? Mr Prescott sidestepped it all by answering the question this way: “Chemical reaction — these are matters for Health and Safety.”

There were many fearful questions — “will milk production in the area be terminated?” one MP asked — but no fearful answers. Instead Mr Prescott kept returning to the bravery of the men and women risking their lives to fight the fire. For once, the word “inferno” was not hyperbole.

As the Tory MP Peter Lilley noted: “I visited the burning oil fields in Kuwait but I never expected to see a burning inferno on the doorstep of my constituency.” It is a strange coincidence that Mike Penning, the Tory MP for Hemel Hempstead, used to be a firefighter. These were the kind of fires, he said gravely, that he himself had always dreaded.

“This is a national disaster and the cost of fighting this cannot be born by the local authorities,” he said. “The sheer cost of this to the community is unbearable,” he said.

Mr Prescott offered to meet Mr Penning to discuss this. In fact, Mr Prescott offered to meet almost everyone yesterday. It is a hydro-cardigan strategy and, you know, it seemed to work.

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