It has been nearly a month since the concordat. Cash-strapped and struggling to keep warm in a ramshackle cottage in Hastingleigh, the enormity of Imperial’s vision has passed me by. Beth — my wife — and I left Wye for the hills the previous August. Since then, we have been plagued by terrible family illness. It feels like our lives are only just back on the fairway.

Neither of us intends to look back.

But then there is David Hewson. The Sunday Times technology guy in the bow tie. I’m vaguely aware that he writes novels. Occasionally, I used to notice him in the bar of the New Flying Horse.

David has invited me for a drink in the Timber Batts at Bodsham near his house to discuss ‘a website’. It has something to do with Imperial College and the concordat. He knows I am vaguely senior on The Sunday Telegraph and I assume he’s just after some work. I really don’t have a clue.

It is Sunday lunchtime and the Batts is, as usual, both busy and smoky. I guzzle Adnams while David, who I assume doesn’t drink, nurses an alcohol-free lager. ‘I’ve set up a site called save-wye.org,’ he tells me. ‘I thought it would be useful for people to discuss this Imperial College concordat thing. But so far only Damian Green, the MP, has written anything and I’m hoping you might write some stuff just to help get it kick-started. Maybe Beth, too.’

I mutter something about being busy, about turmoil at work but promise to think about it.

David also wonders whether I’ve got shorthand and whether I might be going to the public meeting called by the college for the following day. No, I am not going to the meeting. I don’t work on Mondays and, besides, my reporting days are long behind me. ‘Well, I’ll probably go anyway,’ David says with a slight shrug of resignation.

Five hundred people go to the meeting but David is not among them. He misses the Borys line that did more to motivate the people of Wye to man the barricades than anything, the extraordinarily haughty gaffe that the deputy rector will never be allowed to forget: ‘But to put it in terms you’d understand…’

So begins our contribution to the battle for Wye: chaotic, uncertain, and utterly amateurish, it is a wonder that save-wye ever gets off the ground. In those first few weeks, our stats software tells us that the site is visited by David, me and the Google sitemap robot.

Down the road a complex and colourful organisation forms under the leadership of Ben Moorhead, a boyish and charismatic lawyer of London and Bodsham. It is called the Wye Future Group. It descends into in-fighting immediately. Diana Pound, the environmentalist turned planner who advises the group, tells me that it is a classic case of ‘forming, storming, performing’. I have no idea what she is talking about but a few weeks later it is clear that they haven’t got beyond the storming bit.

Wye’s borough councillor, former spook Ian Cooling, is settling in nicely to his new role as a double agent. By day, he is the wounded defender of the village, issuing unintelligible 2,000-word treatises on why Imperial should be allowed to build on its brownfield sites in return for coughing up the money for something called a ‘one-stop shop for council services’. But by night he is giving succour to Imperial, quietly egging on the director of estates, David Brooks Wilson, in his bid to pay off the university’s enormous overdraft by turning Wye into a new suburb of Ashford. Secure in the knowledge that no-one outside will ever read his emails, Cooling keeps up this charade for the most of the next year.

Meanwhile, confident that its operation to dupe the two councils into supporting its grand project has succeeded, Imperial is moving at speed. Letters are being written to government ministers. If all goes like clockwork, Brooks Wilson envisages the bulldozers cutting the first turf on the green fields beneath the Downs some time in 2007. Cooling is whispering to him that the first mutterings of local opposition are not a representative view of the village. There is, says the councillor, a silent majority who support the vision.

But just nine months later, that ‘vision’ is dead. Imperial is defeated, its academics turned property developers humiliated, its depleted coffers stripped of another £1million to finance this fiasco. Brooks Wilson is out of a job, the victim of a self-made disaster the echoes of which will resound long in the annals of English environmentalism. Cooling, unmasked, is forced to make an astonishing admission as he switches sides just before unconditional surrender is declared.

Even for those who were close to it, it is an extraordinary story. One in which a group of nice middle-class villagers hunkered down and used the system to defeat an avaricious developer. But that is the official version and it bears only a passing resemblance to the real story of what was needed to send Imperial packing.

Fourteen months have now passed since I met that man Hewson in the Timber Batts. About a month before Imperial finally accepted defeat, he told me that he was planning to write a book about the battle for Wye. I thought he was mad to devote the time to such a thing. Surely, I said, he’d be better off concentrating on his fiction, which sells millions, than a factual account of an obscure environmental battle that might shift a couple of hundred copies at most.

I’m happy to say that, once again, I have been proved wrong about my friend David Hewson. Tomorrow (Saturday) his book — Saved — will feature on the cover of the Daily Telegraph’s Weekend section and will be launched at a special event in the New Flying Horse a week later. He says on the blurb that this is the whole story, ‘warts and all’, of how Wye defeated Imperial. There are no punches pulled here, no allowances for the delicate sensibilities of some of the book’s intended audience. Apart from protecting a few of our sources, this really is the story in its entirety. Not everybody is going to like this book but I imagine that that is exactly how David wants it. Let’s face it, not everybody liked save-wye and we still have an amazing ability to make enemies out of thin air. But this is an honest and unexpurgated account of a battle that was very nearly lost before it was joined. It deserves to be read by everybody who cares about the parlous state of democracy in our country.

The publication of Saved marks the end for this website. We’ve gone from attracting just 100 or so visitors in the first month to reaching more than 110,000 readers. From a shaky start, it became the main weapon in Wye’s armoury and was instrumental in defeating Sykes and his cohorts.

So this time that really is it. save-wye ends here. Some time over the next fortnight, we’ll be pulling the plug on the comments and closing it down. The site will still be here to read as a resource but David and I are determined that not another word will be added. If you miss us, then from Easter Saturday, of course, there’ll be another 85,000 words to read — words you won’t have read anywhere else.

Thank you, again, to everybody who has read our stuff — both online and in those printed editions — and to those who supported us with the occasional financial contribution to help us with our printed edition costs. We never asked for help and we are enormously grateful. Thank you, too, to the two secret squirrels in the village who did so much to keep this show on the road — David and I won’t ever forget your efforts.

The last word is a personal one from me. For setting up this site, for persisting when everything looked so bleak, for writing some of the most erudite and entertaining copy it has ever been my pleasure to read, for encouraging me to rediscover the thrill of investigative journalism … thank you, David.

It was fun.

If anybody hasn’t yet noticed, Wye College is gone. Its departments are closed or moved to South Kensington, its professors redundant or relocated, its happy and noisy population of red-faced agriculture undergrads a distant memory. For the people of Wye, this is the real legacy of Project Alchemy: the wanton destruction of an ancient institution by a small group of academics and businessmen located in a steel and glass building 60 miles away.

But the Wye Park scandal has also hurt those most closely associated with it, too, and some of them very badly indeed. The time for recrimination is, we hope, past and we don’t take any pleasure in the effect this disaster has had on the careers of its promoters. Yet, just one year ago none of us — least of all David and me, back then still trying to find out how to be journalists again — could have forseen how things would turn out.

Richard Sykes
Neither could Sir Richard Sykes, the rector of Imperial College and ultimately the man responsible for the Wye Park fiasco. Back last spring — as his cohorts and local authority placemen worked furiously to promote Alchemy — it was his sudden decision to bid for BP’s Energy Biosciences Institute, coupled with a series of extraordinary leaks to this website, that were to ultimately bring the project down. An email from Sir Richard to Borys in April, leaked to save-wye in June but never published to protect a crucial source, showed the extraordinary volte face that was about to be performed. At the time, we didn’t understand it. But now it is clear what was happening. Sir Richard told Borys that the ’scientific imperative’ had changed with the announcement of BP’s institute. That Wye could not be the centrepiece of any bid because BP would not countenance building in an area of outstanding natural beauty and that the timescale was too short. But that Wye Park should proceed on the basis that it might make space at South Kensington.

Sir Richard was hoping to raise the money to revamp the South Ken campus to accommodate BP’s institute by flogging off the fields of Wye to housing developers. Wye could not form part of the bid because the institute had to be up and running in 2007 and Alchemy would still only be at the planning stage had it gone ahead. The BP bid became the central focus at the college. The rector was very confident that Imperial — with its reputation and its pioneering work on sustainable energy — would win the institute ahead of competing universities in the UK and the US.

This dream, too, now lies in tatters. BP has awarded the institute to the University of California, Berkeley. The oil group apparently told Sir Richard that his scheme was ‘not economic’. The deal was sweetened because the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, threw $70million of public money at Berkeley to secure the BP bid. But Berkeley also brought in the University of Illinois — with its expertise in crops — as a partner in the bid. Imperial once had expertise in crops — it was called Wye College — but, as we have seen, this legacy was destroyed to further Sir Richard’s wider ambitions.

Arnold Schwarzenegger announces that BP has given the Energy Biosciences Institute to the University of California, Berkeley

It may be stretching things a little to suggest that save-wye played any part in what was seemingly a geopolitical decision, but we wrote to BP last autumn urging it to fully investigate Imperial’s bid and its concurrent plan to concrete over Wye. We received prompt responses from two vice presidents at the company expressing concern that we thought the two schemes might be linked and explaining that BP had “fully investigated” the matter and sought explanations from Imperial which had assured it that its plans for Wye were not linked.

Now, with two grand projets dead and millions of pounds of public money wasted, the twilight of Sir Richard’s career as a captain of industry and academia is looking a little overcast. When he took over as rector, Imperial was debt free. Today, Sir Richard presides over an overdraft of £175million and growing and we hope that he can restore his battered reputation before he steps down later in the year.

Pete Raine
Everybody’s bete noire during the battle for Wye, Charles Peter Everton Raine, Kent County Council’s director of environment and regeneration, has announced, at 55, he is leaving with nothing to go to. The environmentalist-turned-masterplanner is quitting unexpectedly amid rumours of disagreements between his department and the leader of the council, Paul Carter. Mr Raine, who no doubt will now concentrate on his career as an amateur thespian in his home village of Stowting, was, at one time, one of the rising stars of local government who was widely expected to make it right to the top and run an authority of his own. His sudden decision to quit has taken all of his colleagues by surprise. A former KCC cabinet member told us last week that there had been frequent disagreements with the council’s leader and that the decision to site a gritting lorry depot in an AONB and greenbelt at Wrotham had been ‘the last straw’ coming so soon after the debacle in Wye.

There’s little doubt that Mr Raine — who still attracts a large fan base among environmentalists — is leaving with the Wye fiasco staining his otherwise excellent record. But he appears to be unrepentant. This week he told the Kentish Express that Wye was one of his ‘biggest single regrets’ and continued to parrot the nonsense that there might have been an acceptable solution involving fewer houses.

We wish Mr Raine well in his retirement.

David Brooks Wilson
Sir Richard’s “fixer”, brought in as Imperial’s Director of Estates in April 2002 because of his Kent connections is currently working as a consultant from an office in College Hill, near London Bridge Station, having failed to secure another top post in the public sector. Mr Brooks Wilson, who has restarted his Noble Wilson property advisory company with his wife, Heather Noble, lost his job after the Wye Park scheme collapsed and left Imperial in December. An affable and gregarious man, he once promised to take all members of Wye Parish Council out to dinner ‘when it was all over’.

As far as we are aware, he has yet to deliver on that promise but he was spotted recently in the Brasserie de Boulingrin in Reims (a restaurant that promises a fantastic experience for gourmands) tucking in to brawn and other sweet bread delicacies.

He maintains his Kent Ambassador status and his still a trustee of the Brogdale Horticultural Trust.

We wish him well for the future.

Imperial got away with it for so long because of the connections that existed between one man – the ubiquitous David Brooks Wilson – and the people who run our county. They are connections that run deep and raise serious questions about who controls Kent, whose interests are being served by those we pay to provide the services on which the county depends and what can be done to restore the democratic checks and balances that are vital to prevent a total takeover by the corpocracy.

Cast your mind back to the public meeting of January 9 at Withersdane if the memory of that event is not too painful. Who was on the platform, who spoke in favour of Imperial’s vision apart from Borysiewicz and Brooks Wilson? Pete Raine, the managing director of KCC’s bloated environment and regeneration department, and David Hill, chief executive of Ashford Borough Council. Hill was nervous and clearly uncomfortable but Raine, self-confident as ever, was on top form. He spoke enthusiastically about Imperial’s vision, always careful to stress that the planning process had not been compromised. He talked about how a new road from junction 10a of the M20 would have to be built. He lectured the community on the importance of engaging with Imperial to shape its plans. And then, clearly carried away with the moment, he strayed off topic and quoted from the infamous Ernst & Young ‘lie-sheet’, the Project Alchemy Key Messages that we revealed here back in the summer. According to the college’s notes of that meeting this is what he said:

Mr Raine pointed out that the lack of plans at this stage is a well-known planning Catch 22, and commented that he doesn’t see a way round it. He gave his undertaking that such plans do not yet exist, pointing out that, whilst critics object to the current lack of plans, the invitation that has been extended is to discuss a concept. He suggested that if the community could engage in the consultation process, there is a chance of keeping Wye as world class institution, thereby minimising inevitable changes.

We now know this to be slippery, at best, or nonsense, at worst. Plans existed and Mr Raine, even if he had not had direct sight of them, knew that they did. They had been drawn up in 2004 by Ernst & Young. They included at least two maps showing where the college planned to put 400 acres of housing. KCC continues to sit on these documents and refuses to release them under the Freedom of Information Act, citing the exemption that relates to the free and fair exchange of views despite Wye Park being dead and buried with no chance of resurrection. Even if no map existed, Mr Raine was well aware, as we have demonstrated over the last few days, that there were plans for vast numbers of houses – a ’sustainable community of 400 acres’ as he put in one of his handwritten notes from 2004. Yet he chose not to mention this at the meeting.

The day after January 9 with the village reeling from the presentation and without a clear idea of how to stop Imperial and KCC’s bulldozers, the ebullient Brooks Wilson sent Raine and Hill a congratulatory email which you can read here. In it, he said:

‘Dear Pete and David

A brief note to thank you, somewhat belatedly, for your splendid efforts last night on our behalf. I think given what we had anticipated, the meeting was a lot smoother than it could have been and I’m sure that this was due in no small part to your own eloquent interventions during the course of the night.

Many thanks for coming to support us. Borys and I have discussed how we could improve things in future and I know that Pete and Borys have also been in touch. We will follow up and improve on the next occasion.’

In the months since that evening at Withersdane, both Raine and Hill have protested that, at no stage was the planning process compromised by their authorities’ signing of the concordats. But Brooks Wilson clearly thought otherwise. Why else would he describe their efforts on ‘our behalf’ as ’splendid’? Why else did he think that the meeting would have been considerably more uncomfortable for Imperial had not been for Raine and Hill’s ‘eloquent interventions’? Both men were wheeled out by Imperial that night because Brooks Wilson knew that he could rely on them. He knew this because the history of their relationships stretched way beyond the first tentative negotiations over Wye Park during 2004.

Most people at Withersdane that night would never have heard of David Charles Brooks Wilson and those that did would probably have remembered him as plain old David Wilson, former managing director of Eurotunnel Developments. He had changed his name to something he considered more suitable for a member of Glyndebourne and the MCC when he joined Imperial in 2002. How he came to become one of the top three at one of Britain’s most powerful educational institutions is another story but, for now, suffice to say that he was sought out by the rector Sir Richard Sykes who had an idea that somebody with the right connections would be needed to solve a problem in Kent.

Raine knew Brooks Wilson very well indeed. The one-time naturalist and director of the Kent Wildife Trust would have first come across the well-lunched director of estates during the latter’s time at Eurotunnel when the environmental mitigation for the biggest construction project of the 20th century was being discussed. When he joined KCC in 1998, he would have encountered Brooks Wilson again, this time because DCBW, as he styles himself, was an established member of the Kent power network, a nebulous group that was to solidify into an organization called the Kent Ambassadors, a group that has nothing whatsoever to do with the ordinary folk of Kent but is, nevertheless, funded to the tune of £16,000 a year out of your council taxes.

The Kent Ambassadors was set up, according to the PR guff from KCC, for its members to promote Kent as they tour the country and the world. That may well be the case for most of them, but the group was clearly used by Imperial to work up its plans for Wye. It counts Lord Bruce-Lockhart, former KCC leader and signatory to the first concordat, among its members. In July this year, after save-wye.org had first revealed that Wye Park was on its knees, Brooks Wilson emailed Sir Richard Sykes to inform him that he had met ‘Sandy’ at the most recent meeting of the ambassadors where save-wye’s story had been discussed. ‘We need to reassure them,’ said Brooks Wilson, ‘they’re getting anxious.’

And whose department controls KCC’s financing and secretarial support for the the Kent Ambassadors? Why, step forward Mr Charles Peter Everton Raine, aka ‘Pete’.

It doesn’t end there, not by a long shot. Mr Brooks Wilson is also a board member of Locate in Kent — the inward investment quango set up and funded at huge cost to you by KCC. Attending its meetings at West Malling, DCBW is always assured of at least one friendly face — sitting across the table from him is fellow board member, Pete Raine.

Does Mr Brooks Wilson have any investment in Kent? Certainly not in property – he has homes in Bow, East London, and near Milton Keynes and nothing here as far as we can tell. But over the years this busy man, who considers himself to be a property developer, has sat on a number of boards of Kent companies and quangoes. Take the Ashford (now Kent Invicta) Chamber of Commerce. He resigned that a couple of years ago, but not before getting to know fellow board member David Hill, the chief executive of Ashford Borough Council — the man who went on to become one of Wye Park’s leading cheerleaders and ’spoke so eloquently’ in support of Imperial at the January 9 public meeting.

Mr Brooks Wilson was, until the Wye Park plans started to form, the vice chairman of the South East of England Regional Assembly’s (SEERA) planning committee. He sat on SEERA with Ashford council leader Paul Clokie, naturally. SEERA incorporated Wye Park into the draft regional plan thanks to intense lobbying by … er … Pete Raine’s department at KCC.

DCBW sat on the board of Folkestone Racecourse at Westenhanger (an area which seems likely to be the next battle ground for the Kent Power Network, but more on that later in this article). He ran Orbital Park Developments, the Eurotunnel company which flogged off the land around Singleton for development — a position which would have cemented his relationship with both Mr Hill – formerly of the Northern Ireland Office — and Paul Clokie. Recently, Mr Brooks Wilson joined the board of trustees of the Brogdale Horticultural Trust, the struggling agricultural charity near Faversham, which enjoys a close relationship with Lady Sondes — the American aristo who owns thousands of acres nearby and is behind the stalled plans for a Global Non-Food Crops Centre to be sited at Imperial’s crumbling campus at Wye.

He was known well by Paul Carter, KCC’s leader and another property developer. In November 2005, as the plans were taking shape. Carter had lunch with Sykes and Brooks Wilson at Imperial. Afterwards, he wrote his gushing letter saying that he ‘very much looked forward to working with David [Brooks Wilson] and John [McCready - see below] on the communications strategy’. Just 14 days later, he was at it again writing to Sykes thanking him for another lunch and making it clear that he was completely supportive of Imperial’s project. You can read the full letter here, but note the most revealing paragraph:

‘I am very excited about the prospects that the project offers from Imperial, Wye and Kent and am extremely supportive of the concept.’

Hardly the words of somebody prepared to be an independent arbiter of Imperial’s plans.

But it was Locate in Kent and the Kent Ambassadors where most of the action was when it came to Wye Park. It was here that crucial relationshjps were formed and the deal worked up. DCBW, known as a generous and convivial character, shared his position on these bodies with others who would feature strongly in the planned bulldozing of the Wye AONB:

John McCready: You’ve probably seen his name on many of the documents swirling around Wye Park. He’s big in Ernst & Young, engaged by Imperial as the original consulting contractor for Wye, drew up the original Project Alchemy plans and was instrumental in setting up the secret Quickplace website through which the likes of Raine, Hill and Brooks Wilson could communicate away from the prying eyes of the Freedom of Information Act. Mr McCready lives in Berkshire. He has, as far as we can tell, no personal investment in Kent. But what’s this? He, too, was a board member of Locate in Kent and is a close business contact of Mr Brooks Wilson. He also sits on the board of two groups – Crossways and Whitecliff Developments – which are Land Securities companies set-up to drive development of the area around the Ebbsfleet International Station which has now superseded Ashford as Eurostar’s Kent hub. Mr McCready also held a position on the board of North Kent Architecture Centre Ltd, a KCC and Medway Council-sponsored quango – alongside Cllr Alex King, former deputy leader of KCC, cheerleader for Imperial College and ever-grinning presence at the signing of the concordats.

Hugo Peel: Hands up who remembers him in his bow tie at the launch of Wye Park back on December 9 last year? Ostensibly, he was engaged by Ernst & Young to handle the PR for the launch. But Mr Peel is also a very interesting member of the Kent Power Network. Like McCready and Brooks Wilson, he has no personal investment in Kent. But that hasn’t stopped him becoming a Kent Ambassador and taking a close interest in the regeneration of the area around Ebbsfleet with his interests in Whitecliff, Land Securities and Blue Circle.

Paul Hudson: The one-time executive director for development and infrastructure at the South East of England Development Agency (SEEDA) sees himself as an ‘enabler’, sweeping away all those pesky rules which make the planning system such a nightmare for developers. During his time at SEEDA, the quango set up the Ashford Delivery Board, chaired by one Cllr Paul Clokie. Mr Hudson was also chief executive of Locate in Kent where he knew Raine and Brooks Wilson. In March, this man was appointed as John Prescott’s head of planning in the South East, vowing to put the ‘customer’ first. He was quoted in the Kentish Express describing his role: ‘Part of my role will be to champion the cause of the planners and the planning process.’ He said he wanted planners to be seen as promoters, not regulators, of development. A useful man to know if, like Mr Brooks Wilson, you planned to stick a vast housing estate and science park in a nationally-protected area, a scheme which would have undoubtedly been called in by Mr Hudson’s department had it gone that far.

Douglas Horner: A member of SEERA, Mr Horner, like a certain cuckoo closer to home, likes to operate behind the scenes. A friend of Brooks Wilson, Horner sits on SEERA’s regional housing board, its executive and planning committees, an organisation called Business South East and the south east council of the CBI. He was the first chariman of the Kent Economic Forum — the predecessor to the KMEB, a member of the Kent Rural Task Force (with Sarah Ward — see below) a Kent Ambassador and a Deputy Lieutenant of Kent. He is a solicitor for Brachers in Sevenoaks and a director of Trenport Invesments, a company which boasts the owners of the Telegraph Media Group among its board members. During Brooks Wilson’s time on SEERA, Horner and he frequently substituted for each other during committee votes.

The battle for Wye was won but it was a damned close thing. Without a few lucky breaks, the masterplan would not have been revealed before it was too late and Project Alchemy would have been cemented into national, regional and local planning guidance. But the wider war against the people supposedly put in place to protect our precious landscapes and direct regeneration projects to the areas that actually need regenerating rages on. Look at the battle for Lydd or the skirmishes around Ebbsfleet.

The next big fight in this war is likely to flare up in and around Lyminge and Westenhanger just outside Hythe and, you’ve guessed it, there’s a member of the Kent Ambassadors right at the heart of it.

Bill Dax, a close associate of Brooks Wilson, used to run the Shuttle services at Eurotunnel. He chaired another quango called the Kent Tourism Board and still sits on the Kent and Medway Economic Board.

Dax retired from Eurotunnel in May 2004 and changed his name from Bill Dix. He took over a pub in Dorney, Surrey, with his wife and has earned the reputation of running an excellent eatery. He has little to do with Kent other than continuing to sit on the KMEB and attending Kent Ambassador jollies. In August, Dax went to see his friend Brooks Wilson. He had a plan, he said. It was a plan that would benefit a number of people but, he wrote in an email, before the meeting ‘most of all, me’. Brooks Wilson agreed to help Dax explore his plan – a scheme to develop a new truckstop around Junction 11 of the M20, supported by hundreds of houses to be built in and around Westenhanger.

The land around Junction 11 is, in the words of a KCC report, ‘particularly sensitive’, and development would be ’strongly resisted by environmental bodies. The area at M20 Junction 11 is designated Special Landscape Area and contains Ancient Woodland and is close to the AONB. This proposal would be contentious.’

Expect a concordat sometime soon.

You can see the full list of Kent Ambassadors here

First there is the original smoking gun — document number 65 in KCC’s list — a handwritten note by Mr Perfidy Pete Raine laying out what Imperial was demanding. At the top he clearly refers to Imperial’s desire to build in the AONB and to raise a £100 million endowment. At the bottom of the note — which is undated but is clearly from 2004 (you can read why here) — are the people that Raine wants to draw into his ’small team’ to work up Imperial’s plan. They are two underlings from his own department and David Hill, chief executive at Ashford, and Paul Clokie.

Of course it’s just about conceivable that Raine did not set up his ’small team’ and that Cllr Clokie was not, at that point, told that Imperial wanted to build on up to 700 acres of protected AONB land. Conceivable, but unlikely. Even if this did not happen, by early in the following year, KCC had officially drawn Ashford into the process and Clokie was preparing to put his signature to the first concordat.

Now fast forward to January of this year. The meeting of the 9th had just taken place and the members of Project Alchemy were feeling as bullish as they would at any time during the life of Wye Park. It was the high water mark. The village was angry but in disarray. Imperial was busy taking on big name contractors and its lackeys in local government were scurrying about trying to do as much of the legwork for the college as possible. Item 36 in KCC’s list is a long memo from Leigh Herington, one of Raine’s employees, to Paul Clokie. It is written to Cllr Clokie in his capacity as a member of the planning committee of the unelected quango, the South East of England Regional Assembly (SEERA). You can read the full document here.

In it, Mr Herington advises Cllr Clokie on how to get what he refers to throughout as ‘the Wye development’ into the sub regional strategies of the RSS (the regional plan). He recognises that the plan has been virtually completed and discussed in committee but suggests a few additions to the wording which would make the plan more sympathetic in tone to what Imperial was planning to do to Wye. At the bottom of the final page is this:

At this stage in the Plan process, I think it would be going too far make reference to ‘enabling development’

The next document which raises questions about Cllr Clokie’s protest is item 27 on KCC’s list, a handwritten agenda of the Wye Joint Officers Group — which consisted of Mr Raine, Mr Herington and Ashford council planning chief Richard Alderton — dated March 27 this year. The group had been set up by Mr Raine and its express purpose was to aid Ashford in the enormous task of drawing all the strands of planning policy together for the benefit of Imperial. You can read the full document here.
On the second page is this:

‘RA’ is Mr Alderton. The contents of his presentation to the group include the 20 acres of college, 20 acres of research park and a ’sustainable community’ of between 100 and 400 acres. There is also clear reference to Imperial’s smash and grab ‘endowment’ Is it conceivable that Mr Alderton completely failed to mention to Cllr Clokie the latest on Wye Park on March 27 when his leader had just made a statement to Ashford council on his role in the drawing up of Project Alchemy just four days earlier, a statement which was cleared in advance with Mr Raine (you can read Mr Raine’s praise for Cllr Clokie here).

Did Cllr Clokie know exactly what was going on or was he, as he insisted in September, not aware of the sheer scale of Imperial’s vision. We don’t know. The only way to get to the bottom of this — and so much else related to Wye Park — would for there to be an independent inquiry into his conduct and that of all those local government officials and councillors involved in this saga. Such an inquiry would have to be set up by either Ashford or Kent County Council. It would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

If there is ever an inquiry into the behaviour of people like Pete Raine, Kent County Council’s director of environment and regeneration (pictured right in suitable attire), then it could do a lot worse than start with Item 65 in KCC’s latest release of documents. There may not be a single smoking gun when it comes to Wye Park but Item 65 is as near enough for jazz. It is a handwritten note by Mr Raine of a meeting involving himself, Sir Richard Sykes, Brooks Wilson, John McCready from Ernst & Young and Sandy Bruce-Lockhart and Alex King — then leader and deputy leader of KCC – plus Mike Pitt, then the chief executive at the county council. The document is undated but it is possible to deduce that it was scribbled long before the first concordat was signed in April 2005.

How? Because Mr Raine, who would already have known Brooks Wilson for some time thanks to his role as the Kent Ambassador who had nothing to do with Kent, has him down as David Willson (sic) without the moniker the Imperial man took when he supposedly became concerned about animal rights extremists during his early years with the college. And Pitt left his job during the summer for the excitement of Swindon. Hence, there is every reason to believe that this note is of a meeting that took place some time in 2004, before KCC had drawn Ashford Borough Council into the nest.

The first line on Mr Raine’s note is a bombshell, for it reveals the depths of the deception that was perpetrated on the people of Kent for nine months. It reads:

IC need development land in AONB. £100m worth

A single sentence that gives the lie to the public protestations that our public servants and their elected masters knew nothing of Imperial’s true intentions when it came to Wye until this website published the hideous masterplan at the end of this summer. It is the same figure that was presented to the college’s management board in June this year. It is proof, if any were still needed, that Raine and Lord Bruce-Lockhart were complicit in developing a scheme that would have destroyed not only Wye but also wrecked national planning law when it came to the protection of areas of outstanding natural beauty.

It now transpires, this was always a scheme designed to net Imperial barrow loads of cash from building houses on the Kent Downs AONB and our public servants knew all about it right from the start.

Little wonder, then, that Mr Raine chose to scribble ‘Highly Confidential!!!’ underneath. If this one had got out, then Imperial would have scuttled back to the Sykes’s Death Star in Kensington faster than you could have said ‘to put it in terms you’ll understand’.

And it doesn’t stop there. Mr Raine writes down the names of the four people he will approach to form a ’small team’. They are Mike Bodkin and Stuart Gibbons from within his own department and David Hill, chief executive of Ashford borough council and Paul Clokie, that authority’s leader. Could this be the same Paul Clokie who in September, shortly before Imperial decided to cut and run having squandered £1million of public funds, put out this statement in response to our publication of the map showing 250 acres of housing:

Whilst I continue in principle to support Imperial College in working up proposals for re-development of their brownfield land at the Wye campus, I want to place on record that it was never my intention in signing the Concordats with Kent County Council and Imperial to support the working up of proposals which incorporate large scale residential enabling development on greenfield AONB land.

Perhaps Cllr Clokie simply forgot those 12 months he spent working up Imperial’s plans. Or perhaps here he was subtly admitting that he knew about the plans but, in signing the concordats, somehow hoped to avoid ‘working up’ them up. Or perhaps he simply did not pay much attention during all those Project Alchemy meetings he attended and somehow ended up signing two documents, the contents of which he wasn’t much bothered about.

You can read Pete Raine’s note here

Cllr Cooling, who recently said that he is ‘moving on’ from questions about his allegiance during the brief life of Wye Park, features in the latest and largest release of documents from Kent County Council so far, made available to save-wye.org under the Freedom of Information Act. We will be publishing all 73 documents — consisting of emails, hand-written notes and letters — over the next few days. Amongst other revelations, the documents reveal:

• That all those involved in Project Alchemy — including Ashford leader Paul Clokie who two months ago protested that he did not know about the scale of Imperial’s housing plans — knew that the college was hoping to get permission to build homes on up to 400 acres and that it was seeking a £100 million endowment.
• That threatened with the total withdrawal of Imperial from Kent, officers at KCC were the original brains behind the Wye Park idea … not the college.
• That officers and leading councillors at KCC fell over themselves to express their boundless enthusiasm for Imperial’s plans.
• That plans for a road into Wye from the M20 and a new link to the A28 costing more than £30 million were worked up by Pete Raine’s strategic planning department at KCC in 2004, long before such a thing was demanded by Imperial.

But it is to Cllr Cooling and his silent friend, county councillor Charles Findlay, that the first document refers. It is a letter from Paul Carter, KCC leader, to Sir Richard Sykes, rector of Imperial, shortly after a lunch held between the two men on November 22 last year. The lunch was four days after November 18 when Cllrs Cooling and Findlay were fully briefed by Imperial on the Wye Park plan — the date that Cllr Cooling insists is when he first knew about Project Alchemy even though he had mentioned Imperial’s science park plan to an Ashford council committee the previous May and despite being named in a document launching Project Alchemy which was dated November 8.

In his gushing letter Cllr Carter thanks Sir Richard for lunch and says that he ‘hopes you had a constructive meeting with Damian yesterday’, referring to the briefing that Ashford MP Damian Green received from Imperial on November 23. He continues: ‘I’m very much looking forward to 6th December and will be liasing closely with David [Brooks Wilson - Imperial's now redundant director of estates] and John [McCready of consultants Ernst & Young] on the communications strategy.’

But it is Cllr Carter’s hand-written post script which will raise yet more questions about the conduct and allegiance of Wye’s two elected representatives:

So, Cllrs Cooling and Findlay were ‘on board’ and Carter was ‘delighted by their enthusiasm’.

We’ve given up hoping that Cllr Findlay might break his vow of silence when it comes to matters concerning his own constituency, but before Cllr Cooling ‘moves on’ this remarkable aside begins to throw a little light on what he was up to when, as he has told the village, he was ‘working behind the scenes’.

Read the full Carter letter here

Today’s KE rolls into one splash the cut in Eurostar services at Ashford (bad news), the council u-turn on Wye Park (good news), and more delays on the Stour Centre opening (no news at all). Can you see the connection?

What is it with the Kentish Express? Week in, week out it resolutely ignores the biggest scandal in the Ashford borough for years despite save-wye’s publication of plans, minutes, emails and other documents showing the scale of the deceit that lay behind the concordats signed by our glorious leaders last year. Even when the KM Group’s only serious opposition — Kent on Sunday — published a copy of Imperial’s masterplan after it received its first public airing here, the Ashford paper resolutely refused to cover this story. When challenged by readers, its editor, Leo Whitlock, protested that if it hadn’t been for his paper, the signing of the concordat would never have received the publicity that it did on December 8.

Then, when Ashford Borough Council drops Wye Park from the local development framework and its leader distances himself from the project, up pops the Kentish Express’s veteran chief reporter, Mike Bennett, with a whole page on how the project might be in doubt. I don’t go a bomb on secret plots and grassy knolls because I have a thing called a life, but I’m beginning to wonder.

Why has the KE been so resolutely piss poor on this? Why has it not printed a copy of Imperial’s 4,000 house masterplan even when offered it on a plate and even when Mr Bennett is forced to quote Cllr Clokie referring to it? Why has it failed to ask a single meaningful question or conduct a single line of investigative inquiry since this charade was set running by Imperial nine months ago? Why have some of its senior staff dismissed the concerns of its readers about Imperial’s real intentions — now proven — as ‘wild conspiracy theories’?

I’m beginning to think there are two conspiracies here: the conspiracy of crap journalism and a conspiracy involving a shadowy group (yes, you read that right) of unelected people who seem to have undue influence in the decision-making processes in our county. A group called the Kent Ambassadors.

I’ll come to the latter another time, but allow me to sound off on something I know a little about — garbage journalism and the decline of the press. For the first time in British newspaper history, last month’s audited figures showed the circulation of every paid-for regional paper falling; not some, or most, but all of them. That figure includes the Kent Messenger Group’s once mighty flagship, the KM itself, and its ugly little sister, the Kentish Express.

The Audit Bureau of Circulation figure for January to July this year shows the KE sold, on average, 24,029 copies a week – a decline of 3.7 per cent on the same period last year. Nothing too desperate there you might say when you consider that the paper I work for, The Sunday Telegraph, has been registering falls of 6 per cent for a number of years. But the KE’s gentle decline has been going on for a number of years, too. Since 2003, the KE’s circulation has declined by 7 per cent — a drop which stands in stark relief to the success that the paper enjoyed in the mid to late 90s when it was the UK’s fastest growing publication five years running, regularly posting circulation gains of 20 per cent.

The graph they don’t want advertisers to see: The rise and fall of the KE

What has changed since then? Yes, news is more widely available on the internet — though wading through the KM’s equally poor website you’d be hard-pressed to find any — and we are bombarded with inane local radio stations — many of them owned by, you’ve guessed it, the KM Group. And, we are told, people have less time and want their news on the go. But unlike most local papers, the KE is sitting on top of a growing gold mine which it is inexplicably failing to exploit: Ashford is currently Britain’s fastest growing town, building more than 2,000 houses a year. That’s potentially 2,000 new readers — roughly 10 per cent of its total sale — wanting to buy a lively, informative, campaigning, well-written local paper. Instead, they are offered the Kentish Express. Little wonder that, on ABC’s figures, not one new reader has picked up the KE for over three years.

The rot in the local press has been going on for years and the reasons for this are many. But the main one is lack of staff — both in quality and quantity. When I started as a trainee reporter on the Kent and Sussex Courier in Tunbridge Wells in the mid 1980s, leathery old hacks with nicotine virtually oozing from ever pore bemoaned the passing of some golden age when reporters bounced around the countryside in Mini vans with contacts books filled with the unlisted phone numbers of policemen, clerks, solicitors, landowners, businessmen, housewives, parish council chairmen. They only returned to the office with a notebook full of stories. But to my eyes, the newsroom of the Kent and Sussex Courier in 1985 was still a magical place. There were 20 reporters in it — all clattering away on typewriters in a haze of cigarette smoke. Today, the same newsroom has two reporters sitting at their computer terminals. In Ashford, the lack of staff is also apparent. The few reporters available are under constant pressure to ‘fill pages’ and so cannot afford to develop contacts or spend time out of the office. The result is the travesty we are presented with this week: a series of follow-ups of stories that have appeared elsewhere, the obligatory pictures of other peoples’ children and a series of low rent crime stories dished out by Ashford police station’s ‘publicity officer’.

 

While the KE can’t find room to print the leaked map showing the horrors of Imperial’s development plans it can still find space for, er, exclusives like this…

Back in 1985, I was paid £2,500 a year. Today, the starting salary of a trainee reporter in Kent is somewhere in the region of £11,000 a year. In those 20 years, the average salary in Britain has risen from £7,000 to more than £23,000. There used to be a nationally-recognised apprenticeship for reporters run by the National Council for the Training of Journalists. But companies like the KM put paid to that. It was too expensive, the results did not appear on the bottom line, reporters spent too long training and not long enough ‘filling the paper’. The result has been long in development but it is called the Kentish Express — a crap paper filled with crap stories about crap things you’ve either seen or heard elsewhere or pictures of children with chickens on their heads. There is no investigation, no intelligent comment, no serious questioning of those paid to represent us. Lines are swallowed until ‘the council’ tells Mike Bennett otherwise.

And they are still at it. Today’s offering continues to parrot Imperial’s fantasy of a £1billion project when we’ve proved beyond doubt that it would only ever have cost a quarter of that. Cllr Clokie has implicitly accepted the veracity of the ‘map’ showing Imperial’s true ambitions so, in the interests of democracy, we offered it to the KE. Our offer was declined. Apparently, ‘lack of space’ prevented it.

My friend, David Hewson, wrote on save-wye several months ago that when local papers go bad, democracy quickly follows. Is it any coincidence that Ashford, that most rotten of rotten boroughs, is served by such a rotten local paper?

 

In a sensational development, Cllr Clokie — who signed both concordats last year and was, until now, one of Imperial College’s leading cheerleaders — says that he wants to place on record ‘that it was never my intention in signing the concordats with Kent County Council and Imperial to support the working up of proposals on this scale, or of proposals which incorporate large scale residential enabling development on greenfield AONB land’. In an amazing attack on Imperial, he adds that he is ‘most concerned that the intention of the concordats has been widely misunderstood and misinterpreted’.

Cllr Clokie’s sudden and totally unexpected defection to the white team comes in the wake of last night’s decision by the local development framework task group to dump reference to Imperial College’s plan from the core strategy. Coming so soon after that decision, Cllr Clokie’s astonishing criticism of the college is a staggering blow for the college at the end of what has been an appalling summer for supporters of Wye Park. It now opens the way for the ruling Conservative group on the council to actively oppose Imperial’s plans as they now stand.

It is now clear that not only has Imperial been attempting to dupe all of us over the scale and real motivation behind its plans — namely to acquire ‘a £100million endowment by unlocking land with residential planning consent’ — but it has also deceived its so-called partners in the concordat process, Kent County Council and Ashford council as well. save-wye.org’s publication last month of the complete June 12 management board presentation by Imperial College appears to have blown the entire process wide open and wrecked Imperial’s cunning plan to have its development incorporated in every local and regional planning framework before making its real intentions clear. Amazingly, the college is still attempting to brazen it out by refusing to comment on the revelations.

Cllr Clokie’s full statement reads: ‘I am aware that the Council’s Local Development Framework Task Group decided yesterday evening to recommend that the Local Development Core Strategy should not contain a policy relating to Imperial College at Wye.

‘For my own part, I have become increasingly anxious about the emergence and publication by third parties in recent weeks of what appears to be a master plan of Imperial College’s development proposals for Wye. I know it has caused considerable concern locally. It appears to envisage large scale residential development on a greenfield area of outstanding national beauty (AONB) land. This recent plan has not been the subject of discussion or consultation with Council Officers, and the scale of development shown on the plan could not be justified in my view.

‘Whilst I continue in principle to support Imperial College in working up proposals for re-development of their brownfield land at the Wye campus, I want to place on record that it was never my intention in signing the Concordats with Kent County Council and Imperial to support the working up of proposals on this scale, or of proposals which incorporate large scale residential enabling development on greenfield AONB land. I am most concerned that the intention of the Concordats has been widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. I therefore, seriously question their worth and credibility and I intend to have urgent discussions with Imperial on this issue.’

Last night’s meeting of the LDF task group accepted a recommendation from the borough’s head of planning, Richard Alderton, that the publication of a map by save-wye.org showing Imperial’s true ambition in Wye — 4,000 houses across 250 acres of farmland — made it unwise to include a reference to the scheme in the core strategy. Accordingly, the Wye policy, which ran to a page and, as revealed on save-wye.org, had been substantially written by Imperial’s planning consultants GeraldEve, was removed.

The removal of the Wye policy is a body blow for Imperial and David Brooks Wilson, the man in charge of Wye Park, as it prepares for a management board meeting on September 29 which will decide whether to continue to spend money on the project. As we revealed here earlier this summer, Wye Park is on hold pending a final decision by Ashford on the core strategy. Imperial has spent close to £1 million on the project so far, and its removal from the core strategy is likely to make the project too risky for the college which estimates it could spend a further £3 million on a planning application and subsequent judicial review. At its last management board meeting on June 12, delegates were told that the college needed to ‘bottom out the risks’ on the project, an oblique reference to the uncertainty over the core strategy which has infuriated Mr Brooks Wilson and his deputy, Nigel Buck. Their frustration with what they perceive as feet-dragging by Ashford has been revealed in a series of email leaks to save-wye.org

Mr Alderton told last night’s meeting of the task group that officers had had two meetings with representatives from Wye Future Group and the parish council. The groups had argued that a policy on Wye is not needed and that it ‘implied an acceptance of major development in Wye and would make the core strategy unsound’. They sought to have it removed entirely or any reference limited to development on brownfield land only.

Referring to the series of leaks on save-wye.org, Mr Alderton added: ‘Recently an initial masterplan has been published on a website and subsequently gained wide circulation in the press. It shows a very substantial development over a large part of Imperial’s ownership — including the exisiting built area within Wye but predominantly the agricultural land.

‘The emergence of the masterplan does not, on its own, provide a basis for determining whether or not a policy for Wye is appropriate. However, further consideration has been given to whether such a policy is necessary in the core strategy. In this connection, existing national, regional and local policy provides general guidance against which any proposal for Wye which emerges would be considered and there is thus no ”policy vacuum” which a core strategy policy would be needed to fill. It has become apparent that it is difficult to articulate additional criteria without venturing into what could be seen as site specific issues, which is not appropriate in a core strategy document.’

Therefore, the group agreed with Mr Alderton that it recommend to the council’s executive in October that the core strategy does not include a policy on Imperial College’s Wye Park scheme. However, it will keep a modified version of the section on Wye published in the core strategy preferred options document, first published last year:

The group agreed that this would be reworded referring to the retention of a ‘high quality knowledge-based presence’. Mr Alderton added that efforts should still be made to retain Imperial’s presence in Wye.

Read the full text of what the task group agreed here

The truth, in case you hadn’t already picked it up from Borys’s ‘let me put this in words you can understand’ comment on January 9, or David Brooks Wilson’s harrumphing impatience with members of Wye Parish Council, is rather different. So what do those ‘nice’ people at Imperial really think of Wye? This:

Nigel Buck is the acting director of estates at Imperial and was intervening in a debate between David Traske — the campus manager at Wye — and Kevin Cope, the property services manager. The ‘enemy’ that Mr Buck refers to is Diana Pound, Wye resident and advisor to the Wye Future Group, pictured right, who had the temerity to ask about the possibility of taking some office space on the campus for her company – Dialogue Matters. After a meeting with Mr Traske, Mrs Pound said that she wanted an office with ‘four desks, four bookshelves, a couple of filing cabinets, some storage, light and airy, loo nearby, access to drinking water for tea and coffee. Good decorative order, phone line/internet access or reduced rental to reflect the need to have it put in’. Mrs Pound said she would prefer something nearer the front of the college.

After some internal discussion, Mr Traske offered Mrs Pound the former Wyseplan building in Occupation road but admitted that it would need to be redecorated and was ‘a bit sub standard’ which is like saying that Fountains Abbey is missing a few peg tiles. It is at this point that Mr Traske realises who Mrs Pound is and decides that he ought to inform his superiors:

Mr Cope, clearly realising that he was on the brink of allowing a cuckoo into the nest, informs Mr Buck and washes his hands of it. Mr Buck then lets slip his true feelings about the Wye Future Group to Mr Brooks Wilson.

In the end, Mrs Pound did not pursue an office at Wye College, thus sparing the blushes of Mr Traske who, we assume, would have been given the embarrassing job of fobbing her off. Or perhaps somebody would simply have written to her, thanking her for her interest but saying that Imperial is not in the habit of providing billets for the enemy when there’s a war on.