In the news

I like to count aeroplanes, but otherwise I'm no great fan as there are far too many of them for the health of the planet. Anyway, why can't people stay put? That said, having spent £20m to get someone from among the great and the good to write a long report about how to expand London's airport capacity, it seems a bit dumb to spend another £20m trying to second guess the report. Sometimes one has a sneaking regard for more authoritarian regimes which can just get on with things.

Thinking about how these commissions rack up costs, £20m now seems a bit light but I can't find a better figure, in the 344 pages of final report or anywhere else. Not even in the Department for Transport Annual Report and Accounts 2014-15, which gives itself a pat on the back for having the commission but does not tell us what it costs, despite the suggestive name of the document. Perhaps £20m is too small an amount to bother with in the huge sums chucked around by this particular department, with annual expenditure of the order of £10b. Or is our commission hiding all their fancy expenses under a woodpile somewhere?

Then we have the Metropolitan Police setting up their own version of the SAS. Other countries have para-military police and I dare say there is room in our troubled world for units intermediate between the police and the armed forces, but I do worry about the track record of our Metropolitan Police with guns: there seem to have been rather a lot of unfortunate incidents, with the gunning down of an electrician in a tube train at Stockwell being just one example. That said, I have no idea whether our record in such matters is any worse than that of other people.

And what about the DPP? We second guess her judgement about whether to prosecute someone to the extent of calling for her resignation: we can't have Janner's scalp so we want hers instead. But, that said again, it does look as if the whole sorry business has been rather badly handled over the years. We just don't seem to be able to get this sort of thing right.

On a lighter note, the Royal Academy is plotting an exhibition of the collection of paintings assembled by King Charles I. My first thought was that this was a bit silly; was the late King's taste in these matters really of such interest? But then I thought about the exhibition at Houghton Hall which we went to a couple of years ago. Was exhibiting Walpole's collection any different?

One difference, is that Walpole's paintings were exhibited in the show-off house that he had built to show them off in. The exhibition was doing a bit more than showing us the collection, it was showing us the collection in context, a peek into the style of an early Whig grandee. See reference 1 for the view at the time.

I dare say we will go to see the Charles collection in due course. At least they will be proper paintings, not like the stuff which gets knocked out nowadays.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/bob-of-lynn.html.