When plans for a new Royal Yacht were first proposed by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson it was not the first time that such a plan had been proposed since even before the HMY Britannia was decommissioned.

Johnson’s plan was to use the vessel to generate trade deals but it was shelved last year by the latest Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, at a total cost to the British tax payer of £2.5million if it had gone ahead it would have cost in the region of £250 million.

Having said that the former Clown In Chief is no stranger to spaffing tax payers’ cash up the wall with a number of high profile and costly follies including: a bridge linking Northern Ireland and Scotland at a cost of £900,000, his unused water cannons which were sold for scrap at a £300,000 loss, the Boris Island airport scheme costing £5 million, the ill-fated Garden Bridge at a whopping cost of £43million – what is it with the guy and bridges and buses? – and let’s not even mention Brexit eh?

In June 1994 John major’s Government announced that HMY Britannia would not undergo a refit as it would prove too costly and it was later announced that it would be decommissioned.

By the time of the General Election campaign in 1997 the topic became a political issue but in 1997 Labour announced that it would be decommissioned – it took its final voyage on October 20, 1997.

In June that year I was sent to photograph Pratyush Sen, professor of marine design and construction at Newcastle university, who had a model of one of the ideas which was competing to be the new Royal Yacht.

I asked him to hold the model aloft and I am quite pleased with how this shot turned out. The photos had been commissioned by The Guardian and the resulting article was written by Peter Hetherington who was the northern correspondent for The Guardian at the time.

I finally met him years later when we both covered a press call at RAF Fylingdales when I was working as a reporter in Scarborough. In the industry he was a legend with a quirky reporting style.