World's most jaw-droppingly expensive holiday is yours for just £100k a night

If you need a little relief from the constant stream of grim news which currently seems to fill our days might I suggest a little game of fantasy vacation.

More specifically might I suggest gawping at the world's newest, most mind-blowingly exclusive and indeed jaw-droppingly expensive holiday destination.

Ladies and gentlemen I give you Kudahithi Resort, the Maldives' newest slice of heart-stopping beauty, from an island chain which has pretty much cornered the global market in heart-stopping beauty.

All for a mere £100,000-a-night.

Or £1.4 million for a fortnight in the sun.

To be fair, you do get a whole island to yourself and a lifestyle dripping in unashamed, and pretty much unparalleled, luxury.

Now I know you've probably just dropped your tuna sandwich (which is almost certainly stuffed with line-caught tuna from the Maldives incidentally) at the mind-bending pricetag, so I sat down with Kudahithi Resort mastermind Mohamed Ali Janah to find out just who will be bagzee-ing the sun loungers at the world's most exclusive holiday location.

The ridiculously youthful-looking 59-year-old said: "When we open in March or April next year there will be a lot of people who value this exclusivity. This can be an island for boardroom meetings, top notch companies like Apple or Amazon. The helicopter or the yacht can be parked right outside.

"I'm creating the island, an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, only three and a half hours from Dubai and the same time from Abu Dhabi Doha, but yes it will be attractive to Hollywood and Bollywood too."

I push him for an exclusive on stars who might have already signed-up but he is disappointingly tight-lipped - but then Kudahithi being an escape from the paparazzi is kind of the point.

Mohamed's backstory is brilliant. He is not some sort of South Asian Donald Trump born with a silver spoon, he was brought-up hand-making bricks in his father's cottage industry cement firm.

He literally made the building blocks of the Maldives tourism industry - some metaphors write themselves.

He has accrued so many titles and board positions your head spins, but for a taster he is now the principal adviser to Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu on trade and investment and the Maldives' representative in the Commonwealth. Basically, anything tourism in the Maldives, you go to Mohammed.

While still a youngster employed by his dad he noticed many of the "resorts" on the outlying islands were in constant need of repair, due to them being constructed largely from sand and coral.

It was only a short leap from repairing this crumbling holiday accommodation with proper masonry - his hand-made bricks - to building his own resorts.

This was way back in the 1972, says Mohammed, adding: "The scale of tourism was tiny, like 972 people, but it was growing.

"Last year we had almost 2.3 million people. That figure will, I hope, become 10 million in 10 years."

Back in the early Seventies the Maldives was a bit of a closed book to the average Westerner as they were deliberately deterred in a bid to preserve the traditional Islamic way of life.

But in 2009 a policy shift from President Mohamed Nasheed changed all that and now the Maldives has a Waldorf Astoria - a snip at four grand a night - of which Mohammed is, of course, a part owner.

Successful people need vision, a dream and a ridiculous amount of optimism. Mohammed is gifted with quite a bit of all three.

He said he was always convinced the sheer beauty of his country was all the financial leverage he would ever need and added: "I think that is the vision I had, and then that is why I went around the world and sought partners with the same vision. And I think I have been very lucky to have very good partners bringing in a lot of foreign direct investment to the country at scales that have never been seen.

"And yes, there was pushback, the people saying cool Maldives? That'll never happen! Friends who thought I was crazy.

"Not so much now though."

Mohammed is very proud of his pro-bono role as presidential advisor and recognises that protecting the Maldives'environment is not just a moral duty but good economics - no-one wants a concreted Maldives.

He says: "I always wanted to be a politician, I never knew God wanted to make me an entrepreneur, but I was lucky.

"I am a very environment conscious person, so we hire the best

consultancy firms locally and internationally. Development is a very delicate thing to get it right."

To this end experts are shipped in from across the globe to model ocean wave patterns 100-years hence or the impact of development on sand movements over decades, and if any of the Maldive's precious coral reefs could be threatened by development they are literally moved and re-homed.

Climate change of course is never far away from any conversation about the Maldives - the highest point of any of the 1,192 tropical islands is 5.1m (16.75 feet) above sea level. The Maldivian ski team is unlikely to threaten the Swiss any time soon.

"Climate change is a big thing for us, but we are taking adaptability measures and trying to protect our country for the future challenges," he says, pointing out the obvious injustice "we are in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and we do not have huge industry to create CO2 but because of the actions of other countries we are seeing our sea levels rise."

He is bewildered that one-size-fits-all regulations often rule out the Maldives from international aid because GDP is the healthiest in the region. But, says Mohammed, the needs of the low-lying island chain are far more critical than almost any other country on earth.

"We are spending a lot of money on coastal protection but other countries should help" he said, "there is no doubt it is happening, the monsoons are more serious, more frequent, but we miss out. The band cannot be uniform, it has to be about specific challenges."

And yet, with that native Maldivian optimism, he ends our interview with the thought: "But we are very very lucky to have a country where you can swim in the rain."