HMS Defender moored at Greenwich in London, 2015. Wikicommons/Hammersfan. Some rights reserved.A highlight for many visitors to Portsmouth on England's south coast has long been a boat trip round the harbour, taking in fine views of the port, historic ships such as Nelson’s Victory, and the large naval dockyard.
In recent years the dockyard has been unusually full, not least of the Royal Navy’s most advanced destroyer, the Type 45 or Daring-class. These six warships are the navy’s primary air defence escorts, costing around a billion pounds each and completed over the past nine years. They are the only destroyers now in service: the ministry of defence (MoD) describes them as “part of the backbone of the Royal Navy, committed around the world 365 days a year hunting pirates, drug runners or submarines, defending the Fleet from air attack, and providing humanitarian aid after natural disasters.”
The trouble is that as far as the Type 45s are concerned, almost all of them are likely to be moored in the harbour rather than being part of “the backbone of the Royal Navy". Fifteen months ago, the Daily Mail could even report that all six were moored up there and none at sea
