2026 and All That: Another Benchmark Year in Royal Navy Decline

The 1930 comic history, 1066 and All That, made famous the British habit of reducing national history to a sequence of memorable dates. The modern Royal Navy has its own unhappy version of that calendar. Since 1945, a series of ostensibly practical political decisions has steadily reduced Britain’s ability to sustain a globally relevant fleet: the 1956 failed Suez expedition, the 1966 retreat from “East of Suez,” the 1981 Nott Review, the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, and the 2010 review that further reduced the fleet even as Britain moved toward operating the long-desired Q