For anyone reading the article, the bit about the met office already predicting a warm winter by averaging the highest temperatures was a joke. Someone posted it as a sarcastic comment on a blog (posing as someone from the Met Office) because the Met Office had gotten the winter forecast so wrong. Unfortunately, people didn't have their sarcasm detectors set to the right tolerance, and the joke spread to other blogs, where it started getting reported as fact. As far as I know the original author keeps chasing it around, trying to say it was only a joke, but by now it has taken on a life of it's own.
I imagine the author of this piece is going to find out sooner or later, and have to issue a retraction.
The perils of the internet, I guess. But like so many other urban legends, they really spread well when there is a believable grain of truth in it. The Met Office should see this is a notice of exceedinly low public opinion about itself, and act accordingly.