It's official. It will not be a scorcher this summer. The barbecue will not be worn out, and many will have another year of spending a week in the rain in a holiday cottage in Cornwall.

I blame the Met Office. The wet summers of 2007 and 2008 were highly unlikely to be repeated, said Ewen McCallum, chief meteorologist, back in the spring.

“This year will be much drier than normal,” he predicted. “Get the BBQ out. Probably with spells of weather with the temperature reaching 30 degrees Celsius.”

Am I alone in thinking the Met Office should be sued? Along with racing tipsters, I am always amazed that people can be paid for getting it wrong.

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But this is serious. The Met Office's rash prediction of a long, hot summer can be argued to be responsible for trashing large swathes of the travel industry.

Ask hoteliers in The Algarve, who saw a 43 per cent slump in the number of British holidaymakers in the first three months of this year.

Or the villa owners in Italy (down 27 per cent), the apartment owners in Spain (-26 per cent) and the expat B&B owners in France (-13 per cent).

An estimated 10m fewer trips will be taken abroad this year. The recession, strength of the Euro and job losses at home meant this was the perfect year to holiday in the UK - in glorious sunshine.

"On the basis of what was said, I booked a camping holiday in Newquay for the kids this year. Thanks both to the Met Office and the Press, you stink and you can shove your Climate Change predictions where the sun doesn't shine (Newquay apparently)," wrote Stephen MacDonald on Timesonline this morning.

He is far from alone. I've heard from two friends just back from a washout in the West Country. I had a cricket tour to Somerset last weekend trashed by rain.

Tens of thousands of other families must be dreading their holiday long ago booked for Britain during August -the Met Office is now saying: “For the rest of summer, rainfall is likely to be near or above average over the UK.”

Philip Eden, vice president of the Royal Meteorological Society, has rightly criticised the Met Office for publicising such an optimistic prediction when they had relatively little evidence of how the summer would unfold.

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