How the Royal Navy’s flagship £3.5bn aircraft carrier turned into a farce

With a deck the size of three football pitches, HMS Queen Elizabeth is Britain’s flagship aircraft carrier – a 65,000-ton floating airport designed to wage war anywhere on the planet. On its maiden world tour in 2021, when it cruised the Middle East and prowled the South China Sea, Whitehall hailed it as a new symbol of “Global Britain”.