It might have seemed appropriate at the time but when emergency planners issued a statement thanking people for their patience last weekend as Operation Brock gripped the county, they clearly believed the road network would be back to normal.

Five days on and whatever patience motorists and hauliers may have had has long gone as the M20 has been turned into a 23-mile-long car park and other routes are clogged up. Traffic is going nowhere fast.

Did someone somewhere stumble across a file marked “what to say in a crisis” and find a section advising that statements should include an expression of gratitude to those affected?

Who knows? Either way, the point is that motorists have had very few alternatives and being thanked for enduring long delays is not likely to make them feel any better.

Inevitably, we have been promised a review of events - yes, the review into “lessons learned” - but there are some who think that the authorities ought to have been aware of how other ‘events’ would conspire to undermine its response. Dover is fizzing with outrage, with the council leader claiming the town is bearing a disproportionate burden and suggesting it is being seen as an acceptable sacrifice.

He has threatened to withdraw the council from the Kent Resilience Forum and declare a major incident in an act of political brinkmanship clearly designed to prompt some kind of action.

That Dover is suffering partly because of the saga of P&O ferries only adds insult to injury. There was every likelihood that the company would be unlikely to resume crossings quickly and so it proved.

The wider problem is that there isn’t really anything other than Operation Brock because the much-vaunted M20 contra-flow was supposed to keep traffic moving in any crisis, albeit at a snail’s pace.

Indeed, confidence that the M20 could cope with almost anything was so high that a contingency plan to stack lorries at the Manston site was effectively decommissioned in March last year after the Department for Transport said it was no longer required as part of its Brexit contingency plans. It had enough space to hold 4,000 HGVs.

Whether it could be recommissioned is another question altogether but it has been suggested by some MPs as an idea worth exploring.

The debate will go on but there is a sense that there aren’t really any cards left in the pack; certainly none which can be implemented quickly.

MPs are sensitive to the likely uproar of communities should new lorry parks be proposed and the charge that they are risking concreting over the Garden of England.

And they are not likely to get much traction if they call for them outside Kent, which is what the county council wants.

But that ultimately may be what is needed; the question is who will take the bull by the horns?