AS former secretary of state for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Therese Coffey pre-empted her inevitable sacking by resigning last week, one could uncharitably say that a “Great Stink” of the Rishi Sunak government has departed, at least in relation to her record at the department.

Despite being regarded by many as bone idle, Coffey recently whined that she had, “nearly, dare I say it, died. I was in hospital for a month with some of the stresses that happen with ministerial life.” Which must have come as a great surprise to both her Suffolk Coastal constituents and those environmental and farmers’ groups whose meetings she tended to zone out in.
 
The infamous Great Stink of 1858 lasted two months; the tenure of Therese Coffey was just over a year. As to which caused the most damage, the jury has yet to decide; certainly, both created a stench that remained in the nation’s collective nostrils.
 
Unlike Coffey’s dismal record of shrugging off water pollution, the heatwave-induced Thames sewage crisis of July-August 1858 forced Parliament to deal with the problem of the vast quantities of human excrement and industrial waste pouring into the river — undoubtedly due to the fact that the reek was literally under their noses.

Charles Dickens wrote to a friend, “I can certify that the offensive smells, even in that short whiff, have been of a most head-and-stomach-distending nature.”
 
But credit where credit is due, the Earl of Derby’s Tory administration actually did something about the sewage (although a temporary move to St Albans or Oxford was contemplated), whereas Therese Coffey was content to (metaphorically) wallow in it.

Mind you, with reports of heavy cocaine consumption at the Palace of Westminster, maybe they just wouldn’t smell anything even if another Great Stink were to occur.
 
The government engaged civil engineer Joseph Bazalgette to construct modern sewers, construct pumping stations (including the rococo buildings at Stratford Abbey Mills and Crossness on the Erith Marshes) and erect the Victoria, Chelsea, and Albert Embankments so that raw sewage wasn’t clogging the Thames.

This ended the fatal cholera epidemics that had plagued the city, killing a total of 31,411 people in the three outbreaks of 1831, 1848–49 and 1853–54. However, in 1866 an eruption in the then-unprotected East End claimed 5,596 lives, the last outbreak in the city — to date.
 
Flash forward 165 years, and Britain now appears to have now become a pre-Bazalgette dystopia, with Tory ministers and MPs going as far as to normalise swimming in shit.
 
In May this year, Ashford MP Damian Green proclaimed, “I’m not denying it’s a big issue, but it always has been. I remember as a child in South Wales swimming in sewage. Jackson’s Bay in Barry used to be a sewage outlet where we all went and paddled and swam — it was regarded as acceptable.” So that’s OK then.
 
This July, 57 triathletes were stricken with bloody diarrhoea and vomiting after taking part in the World Triathlon Championship series on Sunderland’s Roker beach. Environment Agency sampling at the site showed thirty-nine times the amount of e-coli found in the water compared to the usual readings.

Competing triathlete, Australian Jake Birthwistle, posted the Environment Agency’s results on Instagram, “Have been feeling pretty rubbish since the race, but I guess that’s what you get when you swim in shit. The swim should have been cancelled.”
 
And not forgetting the notorious landfill “Silverdale Stink” which has blighted the Staffordshire village since at least 2021. Walleys Quarry Ltd, which operates the nearby landfill, dump up to 400,000 tonnes of waste in the site year. When this substance breaks down, it can create hydrogen sulphide, which smells like particularly rotten eggs.
 
Local GP Dr Paul Scott from the Silverdale Village Surgery said some residents “were coming in with a real trouble with the physical symptoms, with the effects on their eyes, the nose. Kind of hay fever-type symptoms. Part of mental health always is your quality of sleep, and if you’re being woken in the middle of the night, eyes streaming and coughing and whatever, that is really distressing.”
 
The sort of thing that Coffey would throw her hands up in mock despair and, in her own words, lament she could do “sweet FA” about.

In April 2023 she declared, “Wider upgrades of the sewer network led to destructive works on our streets and put hundreds of pounds on people’s bills. There’s no way we can stop pollution overnight. If there were, I would do it without hesitation. Reaching the gold standard for ecological status would mean taking us back to the natural state of our rivers from the year 1840.”
 
Meanwhile, illnesses in Britain with likely links to sewage-contaminated water have sharply increased.
 
Although the decidedly unemphatic Steve Barclay promises to be no more competent than Coffey, at least we may be spared some of her more hare-brained ideas, such as the injunction to eat turnips in lieu of the usual salad vegetables due to food shortages earlier this year. After all, who doesn’t fancy a nice turnip sarnie?
 
In ancient Rome, the aristocracy savoured “licker fish,”* a kind of carp that existed on human excrement that flowed from the Cloaca Maxima; I suppose we can thank the gods that Coffey was never tempted to introduce the breed here, although it would have been amusing to see the Cabinet tucking into a steaming plate of them in an effort “pour encourager les autres.”
 
*There you have the actual words of Titius. Lucilius, too, a pungent and forceful poet, shows that he knows this fish to have a remarkably good flavour if caught between the two bridges, and he calls it a “scavenger” fish, and a leftovers-licker, because it would haunt the riverbanks in search of excrement.