They had just spent millions doing up the hangars at Chivenor, the work was still going on when they announced the closure!!
There were two ceremonies going on pretty much at the same time at Bentwaters in the 1990s;
One was to celebrate the formal closure of the base...
The other was to celebrate the completion of the major runway reconstruction (9" of concrete removed and replaced along the whole 3Km length, plus a course on top except for where the jets would have burnt it off at each end on rotation, had they ever operated on the new runway.)
Quite astonishingly, no civil servant was sacked for wasting public money.