Tom Peck's Sketch: Sir Phillip Dilley and his glowing visage face the music

Whatever embarrassment caused by his tanned complexion was rapidly supplanted by the words that spewed from it

Sir Philip Dilley in front of the Environment Committee (PA)

In eastern cultures, suntanned skin is considered highly unattractive, regularly forcing over-exposed tourists to extreme lengths.

Sir Philip Dilley, the head of the Environment Agency who sweated out the UK’s worst flooding in a generation at his holiday villa in Barbados, might have imagined he had no choice but to face the questions of the Environment Committee with his skin still as brown as the rivers running through the living rooms of northern England, but this is not the case.

The natural cooling powers of yoghurt are an excellent remedy when topically applied, somebody really should have told him, particularly if combined with tomato and cucumber juice. But no one had.

Nor had he been made aware of the effectiveness of raw potato, blended into a paste and spread liberally over the face and neck, where its rich vitamin C content works as a natural bleach.

He could have bathed in milk, had he known, ideally with a pinch of turmeric and a squeeze of lemon juice. Given the taxpayer pays him £100,000 a year for three days work a week, he can certainly afford it.

But in the event, whatever minor embarrassment caused by his glowing visage was rapidly supplanted by the words that spewed from it.

On Boxing Day, Labour’s Jim Fitzpatrick pointed out, the Environment Agency first claimed their chairman was: “At home with your family,” before they gently corrected it to: “You were in Barbados at a family home.”

But this was fine. “When I’m there, I don’t feel I’m away,” Sir Philip informed. “I feel I’m at home. I’m equally at home there.”

Why, you may wonder, did he bother to come home at all?

Well, his agency, he said, has a motto, obligingly raising his terracotta fingers to provide the required air quotes: “Think big. Act early.” Then he launched into a potent example of just what can be achieved through the powera of unconstrained imagination backed up by rapid action.

“The severity of the flood became apparent to me on the 26th,” he explained. “I started looking at opportunities to return on the 27th. I did return on the 29th, and arrived overnight on the 30th.”

Arguably, it was ungenerous of the Committee to bring up his pledge to them in 2014, when he took the job, claiming that in the event of flood he would “work six or seven days a week” and be “there in his wellingtons.” But they did, because he wasn’t.

The problem with a self-administered PR disaster on a once every hundred years scale, is that just when you think it’s subsiding, it only takes a minor balls up and you’re back paddling around in the brown stuff. There could have been no worse time for the River Bullshit to burst its banks - again.