Spanish ship 'chased out of British waters' off Gibraltar by Royal Navy boats

The Royal Navy has reportedly chased a Spanish patrol boat out of British waters off the coast of Gibraltar.

The Infanta Cristina ship sailed past the British territory at about lunchtime on Tuesday but was ushered away by Royal Navy vessels.

The Royal Navy operates constant patrols of the waters around Gibraltar, which is at the centre of a political tug-of-war between Britain and Spain in the run-up to Brexit.

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Her Majesty’s Government of Gibraltar posted a video of the Spanish ship on its Twitter feed.

It tweeted: ‘Illegal incursion into #British #Gibraltar Territorial Waters by Spanish Navy patrol ship Infanta Cristina this afternoon’.

The boat was spotted just hours after Spain’s foreign minister Alfonso Dastis told Britain to ‘calm down’, after former Conservative party leader Lord Howard suggested the UK should ‘go to war’ with the country over Gibraltar.

The Infanta Cristina was reported to have sailed past the eastern coast of Gibraltar within the territory’s waters.

David Parody, a resident of Gibraltar, tweeted a picture of the boat with the caption, ‘In true Spanish style, to calm down, they send us a gun boat’.

He wrote on his flickr page that the boat was ‘chased out by the Royal Navy this afternoon’.

British prime minister Theresa May yesterday laughed off talk of war with Spain over Gibraltar.

‘We’re focused on talking with the rest of the EU,’ she said.