Sunk! Plans to build new £250m Royal Yacht Britannia are axed

PLANS to build a successor to Royal Yacht Britannia 25 years after she last sailed have fallen victim to the Government’s spending squeeze.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace yesterday told MPs that cash for a £250million ‘national flagship’ would be used instead to build a new Navy ship to protect Britain’s undersea cables from Russian attack.

The new Britannia scheme had been backed by ex-PM Boris Johnson, but was viewed by critics as a ‘vanity project’.

Mr Wallace said he had terminated the competition to build the new ship ‘with immediate effect’, stressing: ‘It is right that we prioritise delivering capabilities which safeguard our national infrastructure.’

He said the new multirole ocean surveillance ship would ‘improve our ability to detect threats to the seabed and cables’. Britannia was the former yacht of the Royal Family and covered over a million nautical miles from 1954 until it was decommisioned in 1997.

It is now a visitor attraction in Edinburgh.

‘We don’t quite have the budget we wanted for the national flagship’

All at sea: Artist’s impression of the planned successor for HMY Britannia