Why I’ve spent £68,500 on a tank

Buying a tank is not as easy as you might think. When we started looking for one, people delighted in telling us: ‘Oh, you should have bought one in the 1990s. There were hundreds available for practically nothing!’ Well, not anymore. Especially not if you are picky about what sort of tank you want.

I’m collecting artefacts for a new museum of totalitarianism and wanted a T-54 or T-55, two models which are pretty much the same as each other with just a few alterations and which are the most-produced tanks in history. They were used by the Soviet army to crush the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; they were deployed to curtail the Prague Spring in 1968 when Czechoslovakia, as it was, sought to transition to a gentler form of communism; and a Chinese copy of the T-55 was used in 1989 for killing student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square who were seeking democracy and a free press.