In a development that has sent a shiver of something approaching self-awareness through the corridors of Whitehall, the Royal Navy has been placed on standby. The United Nations requires assistance evacuating sailors stranded in the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow throat of geopolitical turbulence where oil tankers go to play chicken with Iranian speedboats.
Let us pause to appreciate the sheer beautiful absurdity of this situation. The very same government that has spent the better part of a decade gutting the Navy like a kippered herring now finds itself obliged to dispatch what remains of its fleet to the world's most combustible maritime bottleneck. It is rather like sending a man armed with a water pistol to a gunfight, then patting him on the back and telling him to 'make us proud.'
The sailors in question are reportedly from a vessel flying a flag of convenience. That glorious fiction of international commerce where a rust-bucket registered in Monrovia can give the impression it belongs somewhere of consequence. These poor souls now find themselves drifting in limbo between the machinations of global petropolitics and the simple human desire not to be incinerated.
Downing Street, in a statement so carefully calibrated it could have been written by a computer programmed to avoid any semblance of meaning, has announced it is 'monitoring the situation closely.' This is the modern equivalent of saying 'we have absolutely no intention of doing anything until it is far too late, and even then we will form a committee.'
But hold on. There is a glimmer of something altogether more inspiring beneath this veneer of bureaucratic inertia. The Royal Navy, despite decades of funding cuts and a recruitment crisis that has seen them taking anyone with a pulse and a GCSE in something vaguely nautical, still retains that peculiar British capacity for muddling through. They will hoist the white ensign, steam into the Strait, and probably manage to extract the stranded sailors while simultaneously making tea and apologising to everyone for the inconvenience.
Perhaps this is what we must cling to in these dark times. The knowledge that when the chips are down and the world's most sensitive shipping lane is clogged with distressed mariners, we can still depend on the very people we have been systematically underfunding to sort the whole bloody mess out. It is both our greatest national triumph and our most damning indictment rolled into one.
So let us raise a glass of something cheap and gin-based to the men and women of the Royal Navy. The ones who will sail into harm's way not for glory or self-aggrandisement, but because it is their job and because somewhere in the depths of the Admiralty, someone has finally realised that we cannot simply outsource our moral obligations to a flag of convenience.
