Hot July has been the month our political class finally went the full lemming. Actually, that may be a little unkind to the Arctic ‘Lemmus lemmus’, whose tendency to leap suicidally off cliffs en masse has been exaggerated by Hollywood and cartoonists.

But this has been a month our administrative elite, driven round the twist by the heat, Brexit and general, gibbering fears of its impending demise, has behaved in a manner so hyperbolic and self-damaging that those stubby-snouted, northern hemisphere rodents might justifiably feel aggrieved at comparisons. ‘Excuse me,’ coughs Larry the Lemming, ‘but we small, furry chaps look fairly sane compared with your doom- spreading public servants.’

In a collective attack of the screaming abdabs, our functionaries have been forecasting calamity.

This week, they claimed thousands of us will shrivel and die in future British summers and that our motorways will melt, railways will buckle and sunscreen should be provided free to all outdoor workers.

Brexit is so going to isolate our kingdom from the rest of the planet that we need to start stockpiling food and drugs, and the road to Dover will become a permanent lorry park, amid fears about imports and exports.

The BBC’s (markedly Europhile) business editor, Simon Jack, said a no-deal Brexit would cause a national shortage of sandwiches. And The Guardian reported that we were likely to start killing ourselves in greater numbers. It was not clear if that would be a result of the maddening heat or because we were all so demoralised after reading the latest column by the paper’s resident shroud-waver, Polly Toynbee.

The Met Office, once a level-headed analyst of barographs and incoming weather fronts, issued bubonic plague-style warnings that we should not step outside in this heat and should not open our windows.

Public Health England enthusiastically joined in the ‘amber warnings’ and the NHS issued a ‘level four alert’ on ‘severe heatwaves’. One of the symptoms it listed was ‘confusion’. There’s certainly plenty of that around in our supposedly great institutions at present.

Even if we somehow avoided being banjaxed by heatstroke and dehydration and cramps and ‘intense thirst’ (a reference to the European Commission’s Jean-Claude Juncker?), Brexit was going to do for us all. We were firmly told that leaving the EU without agreement from Brussels would create ‘riots’, ‘horrendous consequences’ and ‘a state of emergency’.

At this point, a theatre director might ask his backstage staff to provide some dark chords and a rattle of King Lear-style thunder and lightning.

Those melodramatic warnings, in fact, came from the British head of the multi-national Amazon shopping website Doug Gurr, from the chief executive of our Civil Service John Manzoni, and from Tory MP Dominic Grieve, who chairs Parliament’s intelligence and security committee. These are three of our supposedly most mature figures, the sort of wise men who habitually assert the importance of proceeding on the basis of rational evidence.

Yet they were hopping up and down with all the sang froid of daft old Corporal Jones shouting ‘don’t panic, don’t panic!’ in Dad’s Army.

Let it be stressed that it is members of Britain’s ruling class who are the leading hysterics, predicting the imminent end of the world as we know it.

Apocalypse soon, folks!

We are not talking here about a grassroots insurrection based on half-heard rumour. It is not the under-educated peasants who are marching on the Citadel of Reason, proclaiming the end is nigh.

It is the opposite: this doom-mongering has its origins among the bosscats, the Sir Humphrys, those ‘top people’ who ‘take The Times’ (as that choicely patronising advertising slogan once put it).

It is they and their allies at the BBC and in the broadsheet (i.e. expensive) Press who are trying to excite a sense of national disaster.

Members of the ruling class once saw it as their duty to try to pacify the populus. Remember those wartime ‘Keep calm and carry on’ posters? That was the attitude officialdom used to take.

Pathe cinema newsreels, narrated by manly voices, would assure everyone that the state had matters under control.

To reinforce the idea of competence at the helm, cinema audiences were shown footage of white-coated scientists nodding in an avuncular way from high-tech laboratories as they calmly planned the protection and promotion of Good Old Blighty.

Laughably paternalistic? Maybe. But quite responsible. It burnished the notion of a secure nation state, and that created confidence which can attract investment and build civic and national pride.

How different things are today.

Any modern Pathe newsreel would need to be narrated by a voice of high-pitched terror.

Those scientists today would have their neckties askew, the buttons of their white coats half-torn from their moorings.

They would be biting their fingernails and staring wildly at the sky to see if it was about to collapse.

A secure and strong nation state? Forget it. It’s almost as if our Euro-federalising elite wants us to think nation states are an absurd aberration. Hot weather, of course, can always turn people a little peculiar. Heat, shimmering off baked country roads, creates corrugations on fervid brows.

And inevitably, the freak summer has been seized on by some in authority as proof of a permanent change towards a tropical climate. They seem to forget that only four months ago much of Britain was under snow and that the rainfall in past summers has been much higher than this year.

The Commons environmental audit committee predicted that heatwave-related deaths will more than triple to 7,000 a year.

These lurid claims secured plenty of airtime for the committee’s chairman, Labour MP Mary Creagh. She relished the attention and did much doleful shaking of her head about man-made climate change. But how accurate are her committee’s claims likely to be?

I attended one of the Creagh committee’s evidence sessions. At that hearing it was stated that there is currently no official definition of ‘heatwave’.

An expert admitted that, under current data, two unseasonably warm nights in succession could represent a heatwave.

Furthermore, although at present 2,000 deaths a year are attributed to warm weather, 40,000 are caused by cold weather.

The committee also heard that hot summers could bring benefits in agriculture and from tourism. More positive angles such as those do not sit comfortably with officialdom’s quasi-religious belief in the alleged disaster of man-made global warming.

And so the Mary Creaghs of this world seize on a few exceptionally hot weeks — we have not had a summmer like this since 1976, though that was so dry that great cracks appeared in the ground — and start issuing all sorts of blood-curdling edicts.

It was claimed this week that British house-builders had failed to design homes capable of withstanding hot weather. Ms Creagh wailed that ministers had ‘ignored’ warnings about man-made climate change and had left Britain ‘woefully unprepared’ for hot spells.

She demanded that houses, offices and public buildings such as hospitals should have ‘resilience’ to heatwaves. Fancy that: a politician demanding more regulations. It’s what they do.

But up pipes a still, small voice of calm, once more to whisper some scepticism. Is it not possible that there are too many regulations? The worst types of building for shade and cool were found to be those designed since the 1960s. If you want a cool hospital, visit an Edwardian or Victorian one with its thicker walls, loftier ceilings and draughtier doorways and windows (much disapproved of by eco-nannies such as Mary Creagh because they are not insulated and therefore ‘leak’ energy).

Alas, older hospitals have often been razed to make way for new buildings which comply with all those blessed regulations which are now found wanting. Such is the mad vortex of modern politics.

How often do the clipboard classes — the don’t-do-that, we-know-best brigade — overstate or invent rules? How often are alleged risks genuine?

Pregnant women are firmly instructed to avoid alcohol. Yet plenty find that a bottle of stout every day or two in pregnancy is a nourishing boost to morale. My wife certainly did.

Doctors admit that it is impossible to lay down hard rules and that alcohol unit guidelines are pretty random. But officialdom goes ahead all the same, wagging fingers and saying we must obey this and that, maybe simply because it can and because it enjoys lecturing us.

We are told at petrol stations and on aeroplanes that we must on no account use a mobile phone because the radio transmitter or battery could ignite a fire or interfere with the plane’s controls.

A book by science writers Michael Hanlon and Tracey Brown noted that no such disaster has ever ensued.

Safety professionals insist that helmets should be worn by cyclists, but when Australia made such helmets compulsory, serious cycling injuries increased.

The ‘man from the ministry’ long stated, with gruesome posters, that importing animals to Britain from the Continent without placing them in quarantine would create a risk of rabies.

Over decades, perfectly harmless pets were forced to spend miserable months in kennels. Not a single quarantined animal was found to be infected with rabies. The bossy rules were eventually dropped 18 years ago.

Perhaps the most notorious of all false alarms was the Millennium Bug scare, whipped up in 1999 by unscrupulous IT consultants, grandstanding parliamentarians and credulous civil servants who claimed that the date change to 2000 was going to cause computer malfunctions.

Aircraft were going to plummet earthwards. Life-support machines would conk out and domestic appliances go haywire. A fortune was spent preparing us for that ‘Y2K’ threat.

It was a mirage. Life just sailed on.

Something similar happened recently with the data protection rules, when companies and charities were encouraged by legal advisers to secure written authorisations from anyone on their databases. This cost millions — and it was quite unnecessary.

But it all made the bureaucracy feel important and it created plenty of work for legal advisers.

When the boss of multinational Amazon predicts ‘civil unrest within two weeks’ of Brexit unless he can have frictionless customs arrangements, is it because he has a unique understanding of the British political temperament or because tax-avoiding corporations like his prefer weak national governments?

When civil service chief Manzoni wails about the ‘disaster’ of a no-deal Brexit, is it because he has truly balanced the long-term consequences of a global free-trading Britain or because staying in the protectionist EU suits his career plans?

When Mr Grieve prophesies plague and damnation from our leaving the EU, is he thinking clearly or is he succumbing to an hysteria driven by personal pique at being sacked as a minister?

These mandarins and magnificoes spurring on the notion of social breakdown clearly believe they are the only ones clever enough to see catastrophes that await us. But sceptics (and when official advice is so palpably over-hyped, scepticism only multiplies) might say it is because they want to boost their own importance and power and keep the rest of us in our places.

And anyway, how much easier to deal with fellow quangocrats here and faceless bureaucrats in Brussels than awkward, irrational, ordinary people in sovereign democracies.

I don’t know but my bet is that if there is a no-deal Brexit, life will just toddle along pretty much as before. I also predict future British summers could be wash-outs.

It is almost as if our political class would love something terrible indeed to occur, so that they could say ‘we told you so’.

Imagine if there is a no-deal Brexit and nothing particularly bad happens. How foolish they would all look.

Imagine if future summers prove to be damp. What idiots all those climate catastrophists would be shown to be.

We will have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, most Britons seem to be coping remarkably well despite this barrage of woes.

The public has this week chewed on its cud and gone about its daily business, rather enjoying the sunny weather.

British stoicism? Or just a shrewd understanding of the neck-clutching neurosis of our ruling class?

Our lemming-like leaders can run towards the abyss if they wish, but we’ll just watch them and quietly laugh.