My kind of yacht
I DO not care for yachts, finding them draughty and ineffectually plumbed, but for Britannia I make an exception. She is my kind of yacht. I last boarded her in New York harbour, in weather so cold that it froze the Scotch Whisky Association's bag- pipes. The Queen, as is her practice, had made her yacht available to some deserving exporters, and I was with a team from British Invisibles who were beating the drum for the City. We drew the topmost brass of Wall Street, but it was evident to me that they would not have come to see us in the Trump Suite of the Plaza Hotel. They came to see the yacht, they tramped along her companion-ways, they admired her engine-room, aglow with paint and pol- ish, and had to be persuaded that the real engines were not tucked away somewhere in the bilges. Then they climbed up to the bridge, where a young naval officer had to explain to them that this was the last surviv- ing example of the systems in use on a sec- ond world war destroyer. I was left to hope that, when the time came, Britannia's suc- cessor could be used to show the world that Britain's warship-building yards were up to the minute. They, too, are exporters. It would be charitable to assume that Her Majesty's ministers intended this, with their sudden and politicised decision to build a ship of state, but they have gone an inept way about it, and cannot have endeared them- selves to their sovereign. I would respectfully advise her to discard the ministers and keep the yacht.
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