Southern Water are at it again. A satellite view of the south taken over the past few days would show not John of Gaunt’s ‘precious stone set in a silver sea’ but a coastline shadowed by an expanding brown band of effluence, writes David Podger of Petersfield Liberal Democrats.

As reported on January 11, Southern Water had been pumping untreated sewage into Chichester Harbour continuously for 450 hours.

You may remember that last January Southern Water discharged raw sewage into Hampshire’s fragile chalk streams including the rivers Itchen, Meon and the River Hamble, for nearly 6,994 hours.

All perfectly legal, of course. At times of heavy rainfall, when the sewerage plants are unable to cope with the stormwater deluge, water companies are permitted to pump off the overflow into our rivers and on to our bathing beaches. There is simply no alternative, say their defenders.

This ignores the fact that for years these companies having been skimming off profits to shady off-shore entities rather than make the infrastructure investments required to increase Britain’s sewerage treatment capacity.

I sometime wonder whether the bubbling streams of excrement flowing into our watercourses are a visible metaphor for the tides of sleaze that engulf us daily from Westminster. ’

Now the tax affairs of Tory MP Nadhim Zahawi have seen him dismissed as Conservative Party chairman, there are still the questions about Richard Sharp, the BBC chairman, over his alleged role in helping to arrange an £800,000 loan for the-then prime minister, Boris Johnson.

Mr Sharp, a former colleague of current PM Sunak at Goldman Sachs, was announced as the government’s preferred choice for the governorship of the BBC a few days after the loan was agreed.

But my favourite is the continuing controversy surrounding our deputy prime minister Dominic Raab.

I’ve always thought he looked like the sort of person who enjoyed pushing smaller boys’ heads down the lavatory at school.

A lengthening queue of civil servants is forming outside an office somewhere in Whitehall to accuse him of bullying.

And then, as if to add insult to injury, on January 25 the Tory faithful, including our local MP Damian Hinds, signed off regulations required to enact the Environment Act’s targets.

This, despite concerns expressed by many critics – including the government’s own watchdog, the Office for Environmental Protection, that it’s water quality targets were weak, late and unambitious.

When confronted by a Liberal Democrat councillor in Waitrose in Petersfield on his support for the targets, Mr Hind made the rather curious excuse that he voted with the government because no credible alternative had been put forward by the opposition.

He then claimed he hadn’t received any letters from constituents about sewerage in our rivers, anyway.

Well, if you’ve read this far, you know what to do now.