John Gibson: Let’s bring Ark Royal to Leith

Numpties at the Ministry of Defence with no sense of history, no conception of what the former flagship represents, are toying – toying being the operative word – with what to do with her.

Sinking the ship off the Devon coast, converting her into an artificial reef for scuba divers, thereby rescuing that area’s struggling economy, must surely be branded a non-no.

Let’s have her permanently moored off Leith. We have here an ailing economy that ails and keeps ailing. Leith wails for a credible tourist magnet to replace the old-hat Britannia. The old tub?

If we have to revive The Navy Lark, let’s do it around the Forth. There’s loads of material to be dredged from Leith’s maritime history.

A complimentary rum and Coke to everybody who reads this and camps outside the MoD in London and protests.

It’s tramatic

Learning all the time. They’ve been telling me in an educational booklet how to land a jumbo jet. Now they’ve told me on TV how to build a nuclear submarine.

What next? Don’t they know I couldn’t build even the nursery version of a Meccano set. Meccano? What’s that? Ask your dad. Or get him to ask his dad if granpa’s still on the planet.

Can’t wait until Edinburgh City Council grab the Panorama slot with How Not To Build a Tramway. We’d have to see the perpetrators on that peak-viewing show. Named and shamed. And pictured. Currently they’re all in hiding.