Iran crisis exposes the feeble state of our pared-down Royal Navy

That the next prime minister will start his term in crisis is beyond question. But how ironic if the bigger emergency turned out to be not Brexit but another war in the Gulf. The past few days have had a surreal air to them. A foreign power has hijacked a British-registered oil tanker and its crew in broad daylight. And yet still, as a nation, we seem more obsessed by what our likely prime minister-to-be got up to at Oxford 35 years ago.

You could say that the Falklands conflict began with a whimper, too – involving Argentinian scrap merchants on South Georgia – and that the Queen Mother’s 90th birthday celebrations went ahead unhindered when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. Yet there was an air of far greater seriousness in those crises. Iran has little reason to quake. The Foreign Secretary’s response sums it up: don’t worry, he told us, there were no Britons among the Stena Impero’s 23 crew. So foreign powers are welcome to seize British ships so long as we have outsourced their crewing.

The Government has responded feebly because it knows it doesn’t have the firepower properly to respond. There was plenty of warning – Iran had already tried to seize another tanker, the Heritage, an attempt happily thwarted because we happened to have a frigate, HMS Montrose, close by. But the Montrose is the only naval ship we have in the Gulf. It can’t be everywhere. Just one extra frigate would allow us to operate convoys. But we can’t spare one. At the end of

‘The Government responded feebly because it knows it doesn’t have the firepower properly to respond’

the Eighties, we had 35 frigates and 13 destroyers. Now we have 13 and six respectively. Sail out of Portsmouth on a cross-channel ferry and you can breathe in a sense of British naval history. But it is also somewhat alarming. One false move on the part of your ferry and it could wipe out a fair proportion of our fleet, tied up on the adjoining quayside.

We have ended in this position for a very simple reason. It is politically easier for governments to cut defence spending than it is to trim health, education and social budgets.

Who even notices, still less cares, if another frigate gets sent off to the knacker’s yard and is not replaced? Yet close a hospital, or reduce nursery places, and the sky will fall in for the politicians involved. Hence defence spending as a proportion of GDP has quietly slumped from 6 per cent in the Fifties to 2 per cent today. In the past 30 years it is Conservative governments – supposedly the upholders of strong defence – that have the worst records on spending.

Defence cuts are a false economy because they make war more, not less likely. Escorting merchant ships through the Gulf would prevent seizures and reduce the temperature in relations with Iran.

It is no reassurance that we are still outspending most Nato countries – only us, Greece and the Baltic states observe Nato’s demand for spending 2 per cent of GDP. Germany, the economic engine of Europe, spends only 1.2 per cent. The US spends

3.5 per cent – quite a bit of it defending Europeans. Either we fund our military properly or we will not only leave our ships exposed, we will risk losing the umbrella of US defence that we have taken for granted for too long.