HMS Queen Elizabeth, the only aircraft carrier in the world to have her name subject to claims of conspiracy and collusion against the people of Scotland.

Most of you already know that HMS Queen Elizabeth was named in honour of a renowned World War I era super-dreadnought despite occasional slip-ups in the mainstream media referring to her as ‘HMS Queen Elizabeth 2’ and such, from the same relatively inexperienced journalists of the type that think five inch naval guns are smaller than a toothbrush. Well, not everyone is aware of this.

During the week we recieved an email expressing outrage at this fact from a reporter at a Scotland based paper, who “for obvious reasons” wanted to run a story on this. It was only when asked for a quote we realised what those reasons were, we were asked specifically for a quote “along the lines of ‘people just assumed it was the current Queen”. That’s right, we were asked for a quote and told what the quote should say. This didn’t go unnoticed.

This seems quite damning – the journalist from @ScotNational telling an expert what he wants [email protected] say in a quote: https://t.co/lIDo6nfYTr — Alistair Bunkall (@AliBunkallSKY) March 8, 2018

The full message we received reads as follows:

Our response was as follows:

“The Royal Navy have a tradition of ships being named for previous vessels and that’s what’s happening in this case and I appreciate it’s a fine distinction but the ship is named in honour of HMS Queen Elizabeth, a renowned World War I era super-dreadnought, which in turn was named after Elizabeth I who also played a key role in Royal Navy history. As such, the vessel isn’t actually named after Queen Elizabeth the first but after the previous vessel to carry the name (hence why she carries the honours of that vessel too).

In defence circles, this is very well known and our recent article was published in order to remove doubt after a few tabloids referred to the vessel as HMS Queen Elizabeth II. I have to admit I’m genuinely curious at why this is an issue as the Royal Navy have ships named for leaders/places/events from each part of the United Kingdom and have done for centuries. Some vessels linking purely to Scotland with no connection to England, for example.

As for her being named after the current monarch, that wouldn’t be appropriate for a host of reasons but primarily due to the Royal Navy not naming vessel classes after living people.”

You can guess where this already surreal request was headed.

It gets odder,

and odder.

To clarify, despite how the above is framed, we thought this was common knowledge and at no point believe we unearthed a conspiracy, furthermore the claims above that the Royal Navy and media were colluding on hiding the name from people in Scotland are simply absurd. For every article that can be found claiming the vessel was named after the current monarch, you can find another arguing the opposite.

The most disappointing part of this is that our original short article here, the story that gave rise to the aforementioned outrage piece, was simply meant to counter the usual ‘HMS Queen Elizabeth 2’ headlines appearing in some papers and give people a bit of a history lesson regarding what we thought was a relatively well known bit of trivia, not outrage people.