David Hewson writes…

For those of you too far away to get a book – or if you’d simply like to know what all the fuss is about you can now find the entire book available as a 99p (or equivalent) ebook on Kindle, for use on an ereader or Kindle app.

UK readers should go here.

US readers should go here.

Readers wanting to buy in euros should go here.

This site is an archive of the original save-wye.org now kindly hosted by WordPress for free. It documents the entire Wye campaign from its inception at the end of 2005 to the glorious victory over Imperial College’s development plans, and some of the aftermath. We hope you find it useful.

Read this document on Scribd: Saved by David Hewson

The final result of the 2007 election is…

Jack Woodford (Ind) 589
Ian Cooling (Con) 276
David Berrie (Lib Dem) 40

To put it in votes Paul Clokie might understand…in 2003 Councillor Cooling was elected with a majority of more than two hundred, polling 470 votes against 252 for the Green Party’s Steve Dawe and 57 for the Lib Dem candidate. This year he suffered a rout.

And with that save-wye’s job really is over. We wish the village’s new borough councillor and his predecessor well, and hope the ruling Conservative clique will finally ask themselves why they have been deserted in droves by the people of Wye, many of whom were once their natural supporters.

Happily, Peter Davison, the leader of the Independents on Ashford Council, retained his seat too, though narrowly. Nor is Wye the only area in Kent to have made inroads by fighting on a local campaign outside the realm of conventional big party politics. There was also a very interesting, and in some ways more astonishing, result in Sheppey.

For those of you who want a flavour of the book, you will find some comments on it from a few well-known figures below, and at the foot of this article the entire foreword by Roy Greenslade, the leading media commentator and Professor of Journalism at City University, London, whose concise, frank summary of this story is an admirable starting point for anyone new to the Wye saga.

Copies of the book can also be ordered online here. Thank you all… and now goodnight.

Robin Page, the countryside writer and broadcaster who was for many years the host of One Man and his Dog, has also been very supportive of the project since the outset. He says of the book, ‘David Hewson writes thrillers. Saved is a real life thriller, exposing the sham of “local democracy”. A must for all those wanting to save their countryside and communities from the concrete mixers and the planning fixers.”‘

Jonathon Porritt, the well-known environmentalist who is now Founder Director of Forum for the Future, writes, ‘This is a fascinating book, full of insights into the workings of local politics, new, web-based ways of campaigning, different environmental tactics, and institutions as powerful as they are unaccountable.

‘As a result of a wonderfully effective campaign, this little corner of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Kent is safe for now. But as the author himself points out, the agents of the kind of wholly unsustainable development that is still eroding our countryside will never give up and never go away. With local democracy in such a state of disrepair, in so many parts of the land, many more battles of this kind will still need to be fought.’

Shaun Spiers, chief executive, Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, said, ‘Imperial College’s science park plan for Wye was in essence a smash and grab operation, designed to let the university cash in on its greenfield AONB landholding around a beautiful Kent village.

That it failed was largely thanks to the website save-wye, the brief but gripping history of which is chronicled in this book. We in CPRE were delighted to offer the local campaigners help and support.

There is much in Saved to worry countryside campaigners, but also much to cheer them. The role of the local council is depressing, as is the failure of most local media to question the developer’s official line.

Yet the book also shows that schemes such as Wye Park can be defeated, however impressive their official backing, and that journalism and the democratic process in their truest forms can triumph when the established media and body politic have gone bad.’

Professor Roy Greenslade, former editor of the Daily Mirror, and now Professor of Journalism at City University, London, and one of the country’s leading media commentators, has kindly contributed the foreword to the book.

In it he writes, ‘…this is not a story about Nimbyism. It is about right versus wrong; about transparency versus secrecy; about truth versus lies; about democracy versus authoritarianism.’

You can read this as a pdf file available below (60K). Just a reminder that, if you find yourself in the village, copies of Saved will usually be available in both Wye News and the New Flying Horse, and at the Timber Batts in Bodsham, as well as through the usual book trade channels. It’s a lovely village to visit…still.

This is entirely wrong. According to an insider within Wye College, ‘the statement will cause great anxiety to our own students; they do speak to the locals and hear all the rumours. We have had to spend a lot of time and energy assuring them that they (and their education) are protected from all the disruption caused by Imperial’s actions’.

The true situation is that all students currently studying at Wye will receive London University/Imperial College degrees whenever they graduate. Some are working on four-year degree courses which will not finish until 2010. They will not receive UoK degrees. Only students who start to study in Wye from next September will be given UoK degrees when they complete their studies.

Wye College staff are particularly puzzled by the mistake given that Councillor Cooling boasts in the same election leaflet that he is a member of the Court of the University of Kent and ‘I shall be keeping a close eye on all this’.

Note to readers: while we will welcome comments on save-wye for the next few days we still do not allow anonymous ones or those using false names. Please — real names only.

Ian Cooling’s claim in his election leaflet

We hadn’t planned to run anything about the Wye election here. This website has never set out to tell anyone how to think let alone vote. All we have tried to do is bring you some truths, often ones which those who supported Imperial College in its effort to destroy the community of Wye last year have fought hard to keep hidden.

However, the statements made by the sitting Wye borough councillor Ian Cooling in his efforts to get re-elected are at such variance with what we believe to be the reality of events it would be remiss of us not to remind you of a few salient and proven facts. Not our facts, but those of the losing parties in last year’s campaign, in their own words.

Councillor Cooling says, in his election literature, that he fought against Wye Park and in the end, ‘My lobbying was successful and the plan was dropped.’ This is news indeed to those of us on the front line last year. Here, from official reports and documents, some gained through lengthy Freedom of Information procedures, others leaked from inside Wye Park, are some things you may wish to raise with Ian Cooling should he turn up on your doorstep.

Last February, at a meeting of the parish council, Councillor Cooling described, in public for the first time, his reaction on being told news of the Imperial plan and its support by both Kent County Council and his own authority, Ashford. ‘I went ballistic. I said (to David Hill, Ashford’s chief executive) “This is in my patch, I should have known about it”. What is the point of me being a member of the cabinet [at Ashford council] and a member of the executive if they won’t talk to me about things of this scale on my patch?’

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act we now know this is not at all how Ian Cooling appeared to Paul Carter, the leader of Kent County Council, as these secret events unfolded. In a letter to Sir Richard Sykes, rector of Imperial, on November 23, two weeks before the public of Wye had any inkling their community was up for grabs, Carter reported to Sykes that both Councillor Cooling and his county colleague Charles Findlay were ‘on board’ with the project, so much so that Carter was ‘delighted by their enthusiasm’.

This, remember, was at a time when all three parties to the secret Wye plan assumed permission was a given — Ashford and KCC had, after all, already secretly signed away their support — and that they would have architects, if not bulldozers, on the green fields below the Crown by now. Carter’s letter is in full at the foot of this article.

At this same parish council meeting Ian Cooling told the public that the infamous Withersdane meeting at which the village was told vague details of the plan ‘in terms you might understand’ had been a ‘patronising disgrace’. Did he say this to Imperial this too? Not at all. Again, thanks to an FoI request we now know exactly what Councillor Cooling wrote in a detailed email to the PR man brought in by the college to win over Wye. In a fawning message in which he apologised profusely for not having written earlier, Ian Cooling outlined a hit list of eleven points the college ought to follow in order to gain success. These included a newsletter and a new, separate web-site, which did later happen. The exhibition room Imperial created and a ‘liaison group’ — surely what became the consultation panel — were suggested here too.

He also wanted media analysis and articles in Ashford’s Voice, the ‘newspaper’ paid for out of your council tax, and published by an authority that, ostensibly, was still an independent arbiter of Imperial’s plans. There should also be a communication plan and even a letter-writing campaign to drum up support.

When Wye Park collapsed, save-wye suggested Ian Cooling release all his correspondence and diary dates with Imperial to settle any suspicions about where his loyalty lay in the battle for Wye. He refused to do so and referred people instead to Imperial. You can read below the messages from Wye’s councillor they subsequently released, emails that display the close and cosy relationship Ian Cooling had with the college which had not long before employed him. It was a relationship in which he routinely informed them and their council supporters of information he felt useful to their case. But it is a partial record — an unknown number of messages between him and the college have simply been shredded by Imperial and, if he has copies of them, they clearly will never be made public. Many other key documents remain secret too, even though Wye Park is supposedly dead. Why, do you think?

It is also exceedingly odd for Ian Cooling now to claim credit for killing Wye Park given that when the village got to hear of the plans, he was claiming credit for helping ‘shape’ the project in the first place. In the early hours of December 8th 2005 he emailed parish councillors to boast that, ‘…I have seen my prime role in shaping the vision for this project, as being to make sure that the need to take account of local interests has been flagged up and heeded…..The mentions of the local community in the press release, are a direct result of my intervention…’

Strange indeed given that a few weeks later, when the widespread mistrust of Wye Park was becoming obvious, he was to tell the village that he only found out about the plan on November 18th and was ‘very angry’. How much ‘shaping’ could he have achieved between that time and the announcement in early December? How much contact did he have with Imperial? Again, we don’t know because the details are being kept secret. Other FoI inquiries disclose that he lunched with David Brooks Wilson, the man employed to deliver Wye Park, on at least two occasions, though he reported to the ABC standards monitoring officer last January ‘Looking ahead BW (David Brooks Wilson) and I agreed a monthly meeting would be sufficient but with some leeway for others as required. It is likely that the pattern will be that we shall each pay alternately.’

Last July, again in response to an FoI request, he also belatedly reported a lunch he had previously forgotten to reveal to the standards monitor: one given by Ernst & Young on December 13th 2005, for him and David Hill, the Ashford chief executive. Ernst & Young are the giant international consultancy which was brought in by Imperial College to create the original blueprint for Wye Park when it was known as Project Alchemy. How much did they spend entertaining your borough councillor? Again, we don’t know. In his late revelation of this meeting Ian Cooling tells the council standards monitor, ‘They (Ernst & Young) made all the arrangements so I do not know costs etc however in the interests of completeness I hereby declare that hospitality received.’ Perhaps these are what he refers to when he says that a vote for him is a vote for putting Wye ‘at the top table’.

If you have the time you can find any number of contradictions in Ian Cooling’s public statements and private actions over this crucial issue throughout the pages of save-wye during the last year, including his own astonishing admission that he believed Imperial ‘probably’ believed he was on their side not yours (you will need to scroll down through the comments to find this extraordinary boast). What you make of all this evidence is up you. We simply believe, as we did with Wye Park, that you should make your decision based on the full facts, not the abbreviated claim in Ian Cooling’s own literature that, ‘My lobbying was successful and the plan was dropped.’ He is correct, though, to say that the ‘ambiguities’ in Imperial’s plan were causing concern in Wye. But they weren’t — and aren’t — the only ambiguities to do so.

And remember: the documents you read here are not our invention. They are the reports and correspondence of the men who wanted to redevelop Wye, put down in private in the mistaken belief they would never see the light of day.

Carter letter and Ian Cooling’s emails (a partial release only).

Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz
The decorated scientist who took on the unfortunate and unlikely role of being cheerleader for the redevelopment of Wye remains in his job as deputy rector of Imperial College. He had been widely expected to succeed Professor Sir Richard Sykes (see below) in the top job. Few inside Imperial believe this will now happen, and most feel that the Wye disaster has cost him the rectorship.

David Brooks Wilson
The former estates director of Imperial became a familiar figure in the village as Imperial fought to get its development plan off the ground. He left the college not long after the collapse of Wye Park. After seeking other jobs in the UK with little success he is now preparing to start a new business in the Far East, where his dormant company Noble Wilson was reputed to be working when he first joined the college.

Paul Carter
After expressions of regret about the collapse of Wye Park, Carter, a property developer by profession, has remained at the helm of KCC, though during difficult times. His authority has become embroiled in a number of controversies, including one over the revelation that it was employing the highest-paid council chief in the country, and the failure of a second expensive effort to bankroll an airline venture that, in this case, blew away nearly £300,000 before being abandoned without a single flight ever leaving the ground.

Paul Clokie
The leader of Ashford Borough Council complained loudly to all who could hear after Wye Park failed, declaring that he had no idea it was ever going to be anything of great scale, a claim many still find puzzling given how closely involved he was in the project. But Wye Park is a dim and distant nightmare for Clokie, who is now in the thick of one of the most sordid council scandals in Kent. This concerns the cover-up of the discovery of porn and other sexual material on the computer of a senior council executive who was allowed to survive in his job until the story began to become public. The prospect of a formal complaint to the Local Government Standards Board remains a strong possibility in this still-running saga.

Ian Cooling
Wye’s own borough councillor has been declaring for months that he wishes to put Wye Park, and the questions it posed about his activities, well behind him, and now rarely so much as mentions the near-destruction of the village in public. He stood again in the local government elections on May 3rd, against an Independent candidate, Jack Woodford, who was a vocal and very visible opponent of the scheme. The uncertain future facing Paul Clokie over the porn cover-up scandal meant that many believed Ian Cooling would make a play for the leadership in the borough if Clokie’s position becomes untenable. However, in an election that nationwide proved encouraging for the Conservatives, Ian Cooling was an exception. Jack Woodford won in a rout that saw the Tory majority destroyed, with Wye Park being one of the principal campaign issues on the doorstep.

Charles Findlay
The Conservative member of Kent County Council for Wye, and a resident in the village, has maintained much the same stance in the wake of Wye Park as he did during the tumultuous nine months of the campaign. He has said very little at all. The county councillor’s last direct words in public about the subject appear to have been issued at the Wye Farmers’ Market the morning after the project’s collapse, when he told members of the Future Group, still a little shell-shocked and with funds in the bank, ‘You’ll have to give the money back now.’ He is safe in his seat until the 2009 elections.

David Hill
The chief executive of Ashford Borough Council has been careful to keep his head down about Wye Park, a project in which he was as much involved as his own leader. Like Paul Clokie too, he is likely to regard it as a distant nightmare at the moment. Hill is deeply embroiled in the continuing scandal of the porn cover-up at Ashford and according to some reports was personally responsible for deciding that the senior individual involved should keep his job, against all standard practice.

Pete Raine
The former environmentalist Pete Raine lost many friends during the Wye Park campaign when, as managing director of Kent County Council’s regeneration arm, he became one of its most vocal supporters. On television and in print, Raine could be counted upon to back up the idea that Wye be redeveloped as a small town. Though a council officer, and a senior member of an authority which would one day sit in judgement on Imperial’s plans, Raine was never afraid to come forward and tell all and sundry what a fantastic idea the college’s concrete dreams would turn out to be.

This has not furthered his career, however. In February he announced he was leaving KCC, with no job to go to. This abrupt departure has never been explained. Some within the council believe it was to do with conflicts with the leader, Paul Carter, over some of KCC’s more outré anti-environmental escapades. Others think it was fallout from the latest failed Manston airline venture, in which Raine was deeply involved. Few have much of an idea where Pete Raine will fetch up next, but his chances of going back into the environmental movement in Kent, from whence he sprang, seem at an end, not that it could possibly match the high six-figure salary — and one assumes pay-off — he received from the council.

Professor Sir Richard Sykes
Sykes, an avaricious businessman posing as an academic, sparked the entire Wye saga by overturning the detailed plan put in place by his predecessor for the merging of Wye into Imperial and its development as a beacon of 21st century agricultural science. As a result his own college has lost substantial sums of money, Wye College has disappeared, Imperial’s tiny academic presence in the village is about to go entirely, and the future of both the college buildings and the farmland of the estate remain in doubt.

Richard Sykes is due to retire later this year. Imperial insiders say he lost interest in the Wye project long before it collapsed, after realising that BP would never countenance coming to the village. He regards the collapse of the plan as nothing to do with him, and feels it should cast no shadow upon his time at the helm of a great London university. Retired rectors of Imperial normally find their way into the House of Lords. It remains to be seen whether the ermine will really come his way.

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.

I’m delighted to say that we’ve reached the stage where you can now order a copy of SAVED, the book of the Wye campaign, for immediate despatch on release date on April 7. But please only do this if you can’t be in the village around this time. We are planning a launch event for that day, Easter Saturday, which will be a farmers’ market too. And there will be books on sale in the village after too. So if you’d prefer a signed copy and a chat please come along and see us on the day.

To get this just drop by the page on my own web-site and fill in the form — you can easily unsubscribe there too. Details of the book will be published on this page from now on. Here is a preview of the latest cover, with a beautiful photograph by Steve Bloom.

For more information head off here…