White elephants

Winston Churchill may have been into pink elephants, but politicians of all colours seem to be prone to white elephants. White elephants which are pushed to the starting line by vanity - and by the huge PR & entertainment budgets of contractors and consultants. So I heard yesterday that we are set to spend £2bn on doing something about the Stonehenge section of the A303 - nowhere near the top of my wish list, despite being a reasonably regular user of this road - and I read today that having spent £6.5bn on a couple of state of the art aircraft carriers, we can't afford to take them for drives. That is to say we can't afford the airplanes to put on them or the support ships needed to supply and defend them. And this is nowhere near the top of my wish list either; in fact it is not on it at all. I quite fail to see why we need very expensive and very vulnerable ships like this at all. Perhaps admirals fall prey to the white elephant disease just as readily as politicians.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/08/ten-minutes-on-a303.html. The most recent notice of the road elephant (not to say rogue elephant).