16-05-2025
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'.
Yet for all its pomp and splendour, 'Big Lizzie', as it is known, has an embarrassing personal hygiene problem. For the past six months, none of its hot showers has worked properly, because of a shortage of spare parts. The 600 sailors who live on board the ship – currently in dock in Portsmouth – must either disembark to shower blocks on shore, or shiver under the cold tap.
At a time when naval chiefs are warning openly of a new risk of a Third World War with Russia, many might think the sailors should simply grin and bear it. Some on the Queen Elizabeth, though, are clearly not prepared to – with one anonymous crew member complaining this week on social media.
'Currently over 170 days without guaranteed hot showers,' the crew member told Fill Your Boots, a military gossip website. 'For six hundred people on a ship not to have a daily warm shower is a disgrace.'
In the wake of the post on Wednesday, the Ministry of Defence has tried to pour cold water on the story. The problem was simply because of a shortage of spare parts, officials insisted, and as the Queen Elizabeth was in dock in Portsmouth for routine maintenance anyway, many of its crew were already living ashore. 'We are working urgently on the necessary repairs to make life as comfortable as possible for those who remain on board,' a Royal Navy spokesman said.
Yet the fuss over 'Showergate', as it has become known, is about more than whether sailors can enjoy their ablutions in comfort. Far from being just a routine plumbing glitch, it is yet another manifestation of the so-called 'curse' affecting Britain's flagship vessel, which has been dogged by technical problems ever since its launch.
From a faulty propeller shaft that stopped it leading a major Nato exercise last year, through to floods, fires and carping over its military capabilities, it seems to be proof of the old saying that worse things happen at sea. In an article detailing the vessel's history faults last month, a United States military website described the 1,000ft-long ship as 'a giant design flaw'.
True, not all those who have weighed in on Showergate have been sympathetic to the sailors' plight. 'If the heirs of Nelson, Drake and Raleigh are worried about not having warm showers, then the Royal Navy has rotted from within,' sneered one social media post. 'My father served on subs throughout WW2,' said another. 'At sea the crew were allowed to wipe themselves down with a damp flannel once a week.'
Gerry Northwood, a former Royal Navy captain who commanded the UK counter-piracy force off Somalia, takes a dim view of the complaints. 'Aircraft carrier personnel have always been a bit soft,' he says. 'If these sailors are complaining about lack of hot showers, then frankly they need a kick up the a**e.'
Others, however, argue that if a navy can't keep the hot water running in a ship, it is hardly likely to master the more technological challenges of 21st-century warfare. And they point out that in the closed, claustrophobic confines of a ship – where most sailors sleep four to a cabin – anything that deters people from washing regularly is no laughing matter.
'If people start smelling, it creates all kinds of problems in that environment,' said Chris Parry, a retired Royal Navy rear admiral. 'It's no good wearing a smart uniform if you're smelly underneath. If people have been out on deck watch all night, or stuck in a hot, stuffy engine room all day, then of course they're going to want a hot shower, and also it's a productivity issue if they're having to disembark from the ship all the time to do so.
'This would have been a ridiculous situation 50 years ago, let alone now. It's an aircraft carrier, for God's sake, it has to generate a huge amount of power anyway. And if you haven't got the parts to fix the showers, what else don't you have the parts for?'
His concerns were echoed by Ryan Ramsey, who spent three years as captain of the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Turbulent. 'In the 1990s, when I was on a diesel-powered submarine, you could go for four weeks when you wouldn't shower at all, and everyone would end up smelling of diesel – but that's when you're on patrol.
'Functionally, yes, it's fine to have cold showers, and nobody expects creature comforts during wartime, but these sailors on HMS Queen Elizabeth aren't out fighting a war, they're in dock having a refit. As always, the Navy says that they put their sailors first – but then they don't. They should not have allowed this situation to go on for so long.'
Defence chiefs point out that vast, technically complex fighting machines such as naval ships nearly always encounter technical problems at times, and that often these become clear only once the vessel has been tested by a decent spell at sea. Even so, the Queen Elizabeth, which cost around £7 billion and entered service in 2020, seems to be a case in point.
Last year, it had to pull out of leading Operation Steadfast Defender, a major Nato exercise off the Norwegian coast, because of problems with a propeller shaft. It was a humiliating setback for what was supposed to be the largest demonstration of Nato sea power since the Cold War.
The Queen Elizabeth's place in the exercise was instead taken by its sister carrier, HMS Prince of Wales – which itself also broke down, off England's south coast in 2022 after damage to its propeller shaft. Royal Navy sources have insisted that the propeller issues are different on both craft, and not part of a systemic design flaw. En route to Scotland's Rosyth dockyard for repairs to the propeller last year, a fire also broke out in the Queen Elizabeth. And in 2019, it suffered a leak that saw water rise to 'neck-high' in flooded areas of the ship.
That same year, it was also dogged by personnel fiascos, with its commanding officer at the time, Cdre Nick Cooke-Priest, controversially relieved of his command for allegedly using one of the ship's staff cars for his children's school run.
Even when the Queen Elizabeth has been fully functional, critics have often had it in their sights. Because it lacks 'catapults' to help jets take off, the range of jet fighters it can carry is limited. Meanwhile, some former military chiefs have questioned whether it should ever have even been commissioned.
Lord Houghton of Richmond, a former Chief of the Defence Staff, told a Commons committee in 2019 that the Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales were effectively vanity projects, 'too totemic to Britain's sense of place in the world'. He said the billions spent on the ships – the only two aircraft carriers in Britain's fleet – were a waste of money without vastly more investment in the Royal Navy as a whole.
Showergate is not the only embarrassing headline to engulf the Navy this week. Over the weekend, it transpired that the head of the service, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Ben Key, had been removed from his duties while under investigation over allegations of having an extra-marital affair with a subordinate. And yesterday, it came to light that Lt-Cdr Martyn Mayger, the commander of HMS Tyne, a warship protecting British waters from Russian submarines, was being investigated over allegations of 'unacceptable sexual behaviour' with an underling.
Both cases leave the Navy facing the prospect of potentially embarrassing disciplinary hearings ahead, which may do further damage to its reputation. Meanwhile, retired Rear Admiral Parry hopes that the top brass in the Queen Elizabeth have done the same personnel training that he did as a young officer – which included how to deal with sailors with poor hygiene.
'When you become an officer, you're trained to deal with all kinds of issues, from people being killed in action through to delicate personnel issues like personal hygiene. We were taught how to call people out if they had body odour – it's not something that people like to talk about in civilian life, but on a ship you have no choice.'
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