I know we live in a global village but it’s still a little odd to be sitting through a media interview in Bangkok and have a curious journalist turn to you and ask, ‘So tell me about this environmental campaign in Kent.’

The story of the great battle to save Wye, told in my book Saved, is certainly reaching some distant quarters. In short, this was a rare instance of a bunch of stroppy locals turning on a dodgy development scheme aimed at despoiling protected countryside and roundly kicking the blasted thing out of court. Several of those behind this rotten plan are now without jobs. But has there been a single word of apology from any of those involved, Imperial College, Kent County Council and Ashford Borough Council?

Not at all. It’s as if the whole rotten, stinking story never happened. These people still go on as before, and still, thank goodness, get a good kicking elsewhere from time to time. The latest defeat for the ‘let’s concrete over the green acres of Kent’ brigade has happened elsewhere in the county at Wrotham. There KCC members oddly overturned the strong recommendations of its officers to throw out a plan for a 24-acre block factory inside the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). After a stout assault on this ludicrous idea locals have now forced its collapse, in a debacle that may well end up with KCC having to fork out public money to pay for everyone’s costs.

In another part of the AONB KCC is still attempting to railroad through a controversial ‘highway superdepot’ which is in such a mess the local borough council, Tonbridge and Malling, is now taking out an enforcement order against the county authority for breaching planning regulations. This looks like being one more monumental cockup that will end up in a big bill for the county’s unfortunate tax payers. It almost makes Wye - the bill for which has never been revealed - look like small beer.

If you want to read these shocking details in full please take a look at the amazing and detailed retelling of events by a spokesperson for the Keep Boroughs Green organisation which you will find here. The whole mess beggars belief.

I was chatting to someone in Bangkok today who was bemoaning the unfinished railway line from the city centre to the new international airport which is still incomplete, and will remain so probably for two years.

‘People think it’s all down to incompetence and corruption,’ he said casually. ‘At least you don’t have to deal with that in the UK.’

No. Of course we don’t.