It is a measure of how volatile and unpredictable the asylum crisis is that less than three years ago, Kent County Council was contemplating closing down its reception centre in Cranbrook because there was no longer any need for it.

The decommissioning was delayed slightly amid unfounded concerns that the London Olympics might be used by child traffickers to bring people into the UK while the authorities had other concerns and the public was watching the TV.

And there was even a question mark over the use of another centre, Milbank in Ashford, which served a similar function and closure was mooted for that, too.

Kent decided against shutting that down and it was, as events have turned out, the best decision.

Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show just how the numbers of unaccompanied asylum seekers being placed at Milbank have grown.

In July 2013, the centre was looking after 21 children. The following year it was 39. And this July? The figure leapt to 147 - a staggering 276% increase.

The migrant camps in Calais are indisputably a major cause for the pressure on Kent's social services.

But as events in the last few days have vividly underlined, the issue of asylum is not one confined to what happens in a town in northern France and a peninsula English county 20 miles away.

We have been here before, of course.

A decade ago, Kent County Council was bearing the brunt of a not dissimilar challenge: the funding it got from the Home Office to deal with the spiralling number of unaccompanied child asylum seekers arriving in Kent.

Back then, the county council was arguing with the Home Office that it was being left out of pocket because once children reached the age of 16, authorities got less money to care for them.

Fast forward to 2015 and the main issue preoccupying KCC is the dispute about the level of funding it gets from the Home Office for asylum seekers under the age of 18.

KCC is doing what it can but with limited resources - it estimates that there is now a £6m shortfall which the government is apparently equivocating over and has warned that the pressure on the authority is only going to grow in the short term.

The government was slow to respond on Operation Stack, belatedly recognising that it was not an issue that Kent's public authorities should be left to deal with.

It cannot afford to do the same with the asylum crisis and leave council taxpayers in Kent to pick up the tab for what is a national - not to say international - problem.

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Newly-elected backbenchers can be circumspect about tackling their own government over controversial issues.

And there are not many issues in Kent that are more controversial than asylum and immigration.

The Tonbridge and Malling Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat deserves credit for speaking out and calling on the government to accept more refugees facing persecution in Syria.

He chose his words diplomatically, as you might expect, but did so from a position of having direct experience of the Middle East.

What is interesting is that his sentiments appear to have chimed with a shift in the public mood about the issue to which the government has been slow to react.

The political rhetoric over asylum and immigration up until the last few days has been uncompromising with the Conservative government giving no indication that it was prepared to shift its position.

Despite a U-turn on accepting more refugees, David Cameron has allowed an impression to be created that he is out of touch with a changing public mood.