Not quite true here, but as I said earlier, both this and the last Beast in 2018 were preceded by much snowier periods in the same winters.
Interesting you say that - we had that cold rain easterly earlier in January (which dumped 2 inches of rain here). In years gone past, a degree or so colder, that would have been snow.
At least the "echo easterly", which we're still in, was cold enough for it to be snow this time!
Incidentally one of the odd things of this spell has been GFS - which has consistently underestimated temperatures. (It has -4C for now, for example, for here, whereas it's actually just -0.3C. It had a high of -2C, when it was +0.3C - and so on. I don't really know why it's doing it, but it's been persistent for several days now.)