Rue Britannia! Plan to Replace Royal Yacht Makes Waves

She’d make quite a stir at your neighborhood marina, for Britannia, standard-bearer of a great seagoing nation, is to most yachts as palaces are to condos. Built for empire-hopping, Britannia is longer than a football field and has a crew of 250, including two dozen musicians.

All hands on deck, though, for as Britannia makes her farewell voyage, Britain’s royal yacht is leaving a turbulent wake of political squabbling in the House of Commons--and a sense of bereavement in the House of Windsor.

Queen Elizabeth II, who commissioned the 412-foot vessel in Scotland during the first year of her reign in 1953, is distressed to see the Britannia go. And she is “deeply dismayed” that its replacement has become a political football in a raucous national election campaign.

Now at sea on a seven-month, 19-nation commercial and diplomatic goodwill tour that will take it to Hong Kong in June for the hand-over of the colony to China, the Britannia is showing her age. With annual operating costs of about $16 million and in need of ruinously expensive refitting, Britannia is lovely but outmoded. She is due for decommissioning at year’s end.

Hardly had the tugs Sheepdog and Setter nudged Britannia out to sea from Southhampton last week when Defense Minister Michael Portillo announced that the government would spend $100 million of public funds to build a replacement.

Like its predecessors, a new yacht would be “a symbol of the nation’s pride,” said Portillo, a leader of the ruling Conservative Party. “It will be designed to exhibit an enduring level of style, elegance and the dignity appropriate to its role, and should act as a showcase for Britain’s design and engineering skills.”

Then came the gale. The government had not consulted with opposition parties before its surprise announcement. The always delicate and often knotty relations between political leaders and the monarch are traditionally regarded as nonpartisan issues to be resolved behind closed doors before policies are announced.

“Her Majesty is unhappy at the way the issue has been handled because it has been turned into a political issue,” a royal source told British reporters. Neither the queen nor her son and heir apparent, Prince Charles, “has rigid views on whether the money should come from public or private sources,” the source said.

But many of their subjects do, including opposition Parliament members. Even some Conservatives accused the government of stage-managing the announcement in a jingoistic search for votes. While Parliament resounded in rowdy debate, one poll showed that 72% of respondents believed that it is a bad idea to publicly finance a new yacht for a monarchy tarnished by scandal and dwindling esteem.

Field Marshal Lord Carver, who opposes any royal yacht, said the government’s failure to seek a political consensus was a great gaffe.

“This government lives on a permanent banana skin. The losers here are the royals, who have been dragged into controversy which could have been avoided,” he said.

In the tumult, the Labor Party announced that there would be no public money for a yacht, at least for the first two years of any Labor government.

Portillo, the Conservative, lamented that the Labor Party had “no understanding of the monarchy, no understanding of the appropriate way in which the nation should be supporting the monarchy, and the way the nation is projected abroad.”