Chris

Taking out incoming missiles is the one thing the T45 was designed to do above everything else, that being the next generation priority identified after that little skirmish in the South Atlantic where incoming missiles turned out to be a significant inconvenience. A single one of these ships sat between the South American mainland and the Falkland Islands would have ensured a very different outcome. From time to time the RN sails one of them south and has it patrol up and down, to make that very point.

The problem with the T45 is that there aren’t nearly enough of them, and those that were built (6 of the originally planned 12) were fitted with woefully inadequate power systems. All of them have had to have their hulls blowtorched open to get new engines in. The reason Dragon is going and other deployable T45s are not is that it has completed this ‘power improvement programme’ and so stands half a chance of not blowing a fuse in the warm waters of the Med.

To be fair to the Conservative Party for a moment, the shortcomings of the T45 programme belong to the Blair-Brown years, not the Coalition or subsequent Tory administrations.