𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Defence policy has never really been this Labour Government’s strongest suit, but the party has plummeted to a new nadir of credibility courtesy of Defence Secretary John Healey’s interview with LBC’s Nick Ferrari on Thursday. When asked by the presenter why Germany was having to lend the UK a frigate to lead a long-planned NATO naval exercise because the Royal Navy “didn’t have one available”, he had no answer.

When Ferrari followed up by asking how many frigates and destroyers the Royal Navy currently has, Healey replied “17”, which is wrong. And when asked where they all were and what they were doing, the Defence Secretary didn’t know. As disastrous interviews go, that one will take some beating.

We shouldn’t expect the Defence Secretary to be across all the minutiae of his remit – as long as he knows who to ask – but the number and whereabouts of Britain’s warships is pretty fundamental stuff.

For the record, the Royal Navy has six T45 destroyers and seven (soon to be six) T23 frigates, making a total of 13 and not 17 as Healey imagines.

Of the T45s, HMS Dragon has recently deployed to the eastern Mediterranean to defend British bases in Cyprus in a classic example of shutting the door after the horse has bolted.

HMS Duncan is active and available for tasking, while the other four are in various stages of maintenance and refit. The T23s are rapidly reaching their end of service and some have been retired already.

The remainder are either active or in various stages of maintenance or refit. Their replacements, the T26 city class, are being built at a glacial pace to keep costs down. The first of the class, HMS Glasgow, is not expected to join the Royal Navy until 2028.

This makes for pretty grim reading for an island nation that has historically relied on the Royal Navy to protect its shores and global interests.

That Britain was unable to deploy one destroyer to Cyprus until four weeks after the drone attack on RAF Akrotiri is a searing indictment of the UK’s unpreparedness and successive governments’ failure to fund defence properly.

And it will get worse before it ever gets better.

It’s hardly a case of deciding that we need more warships and turning on the tap. Building a modern destroyer or frigate typically takes five to eight years from keel laying to commissioning, with complex lead ships sometimes taking up to 10 years.

Actual construction in the shipyard generally spans three to five years, with additional years needed for design, planning, procurement of long-lead items, and final sea trials.

So the Royal Navy is going to be in its diminished state for a considerable time yet, if indeed it recovers in numbers at all. There’s a distinct possibility too that the planned introduction of the new T26 frigates will be disrupted as some are diverted to Norway as part of an export deal, meaning Britain will wait even longer for them to come into service.

Plus, it’s not as if UK naval taskings are likely to diminish in the future. The Prime Minister has just agreed that the British armed forces and law enforcement officers will now be able to interdict Russian vessels that have been sanctioned by the UK and are transiting through UK waters.

It follows the Royal Navy supporting allies with the monitoring and tracking of several shadow fleet ships to enable interdiction in European and Mediterranean waters in recent weeks.

While many such future interdictions may be carried out by smaller craft and helicopters, Royal Navy frigates are likely to be involved.

There is a limit to how much we can expect our Navy to be able to accomplish given its diminished state and reduced numbers, and sadly there is no magic wand the Government can brandish to make the current problems go away. The Royal Navy, like the Army and the RAF, is underfunded, underequipped, undermanned, and overstretched.

As I have written many times before, when you go to war, you go with what you have to hand, not what you’d like to have. If urgent and immediate action is not taken to reverse this downward trend, then we, the electorate, risk putting our servicemen and women in harm’s way on our behalf without the appropriate means to fight. That should be on our collective conscience.

As for the current state of the Royal Navy, the victor of Trafalgar, Admiral Lord Nelson, will be spinning in his grave. Britannia once ruled the waves, but not any more.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford is a political and defence commentator and former army officer. Sign up for his podcasts and newsletters at www.DefenceReview.uk