Scuttle for Cover

If anything can excuse the scrapping of plans for a new royal yacht, the hatching of plans for new-fangled military snoopery must surely be a candidate. The National Johnson's idea, if idea is the word I want, for a "national flagship" to toddle about the world spreading peace, Britishness and post-Brexit trade has been cancelled in favour of a multi-role ocean surveillance ship which will protect the national infrastructure from the fiend Putin and his reckless disregard for those international arrangements painstakingly designed to keep the lesser breeds in line. Fishy Rishi is in an excellent position to appreciate the futility of Johnson's vanity projects, having himself spent several years as one; but it remains to be seen whether many will share his belief that pale floating pachyderms are necessarily the more rah-rah for being military. The Minister for Wog-Bombing, who had previously denounced yacht sceptics in true Brexitannic fashion, had a bit of a burble about protecting undersea cables and sniffing out threats to the sea-bed, which will probably strike the more patriotic breed of Conservative as being dangerously close to boffin stuff or, worse yet, wishy-washy woke environmentalism, rather than good old-fashioned freedom of the seas.