Our f limsy f leet can’t rule the waves

AS THE ridiculous floating car park and target, HMS Queen Elizabeth, steams eastwards, with half of its aircraft not ours but under the command of President Joe Biden, our real working Navy shrinks into nothingness.

Back in the 1980s, when I was a defence reporter, the official line was that we maintained ‘about 50’ frigates and destroyers, major workhorse surface ships useful for almost any tasks but utterly vital for the bedrock task of home defence.

It was such vessels which pretty much saved the nation’s bacon in 1940 and afterwards. Their destruction of the German destroyer fleet at Narvik made a Nazi invasion of this country virtually impossible. And it was destroyers which rescued much of the Army at Dunkirk. The cost was high. Of the 176 destroyers with which Britain had started the war in 1939, only 68 were still fit for service in home waters after Dunkirk.

Later, they defeated the very real U-boat threat. Hence our famous, frantic plea to the USA in 1940 to lend us some of theirs.

We now have, by my calculation, just 18 such ships. This could be why one of them, HMS Monmouth, was decommissioned very quietly, without ceremony on June 30. Normally the Navy marks such events with some style – when HMS Ocean was decommissioned in 2018 the Queen herself attended the event. Whitehall sources were unable to tell me when, if ever, any major surface ship had previously been decommissioned on the quiet.

And how much use are the vessels we do have? A few weeks ago there was a lot of fuss when HMS Defender, a newish Type 45 destroyer, was sent to the Black Sea on a successful mission to irritate Vladimir Putin. But I doubt if it impressed him, or anyone else who knows his naval onions.

There are only six in this class (12 were originally planned) and they cost roughly £1billion each. Yet at least three of them have embarrassingly broken down. It is lucky that Defender did not conk out during her Crimean episode.

The miserable truth is that, thanks to early retirement of existing vessels, cancellations and general decay, our surface fleet is now alarmingly weak. The two gigantic aircraft carriers ordered by Gordon Brown were mainly a job-creation scheme, and nobody really knows what they are for.

The same is true of our Trident nuclear submarine fleet, a Cold War superpower weapon vastly too big and complex for a small, increasingly poor country such as we have now become. Israel, in much more danger than us, manages with a far more modest nuclear deterrent.

But the colossal piles of money spent on them have left the proper Navy denuded. You cannot create a fleet overnight. If, for some unforeseeable reason, we need to defend our home islands again, we are in no fit state to do so. Someone should be worried about this.