Sunday 24 December 2006

Merry Christmas to our politicians!

Time to give them a break. You see, there's been another row about yet more expenditure by the Scottish parliament:
TWO photographs of Scots politicians are to be taken at a cost of around £10,000 to the taxpayer, it has emerged - after parliament managers decided to fly in a world-famous photographer from America to do the job.

Holyrood officials agreed that they needed to have official photographic portraits taken of George Reid, the presiding officer and Sir David Steel, his predecessor.

But instead of employing a Scots-based photographer, they decided to bring in Harry Benson, the legendary news photographer who lives in New York.

At least we can be reasonably sure that Mr Benson won't end up charging us forty times the quoted price.

Let's assume that only one Scot in ten pays any tax at all. Divide £10,000 by 500,000 and I reckon that my share of Benson's fee is 2P and it's money well spent! Why? Because I'd quite forgotten to go to the Benson exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and it ends in a couple of weeks. I went along yesterday and what an excellent thing it is:


Merry Christmas
Originally uploaded by David Farrer.

(UPDATE: here are some of Benson's famous photos.)

1 comment:

David Farrer said...

Comment made on previous template:

Thank you for reminding me, David! I must have walked past the gallery a hundred times since the summer, and each time made a mental note of the end date of the exhibition, but naturally it has slipped my mind until now.

I will just have time to visit the exhibition when I return from my holidays.
24 December 2006, 18:25:44 GMT