I surmise that many of the things that Mr Churchill ordered his military to do at that time were a bit like symbolic gestures.
Exactly.
When Churchill was running the admiralty he produced the report that said sending any less than 8 battleships to the far east would be a waste of effort , also that they shouldn't be sent without aircraft carriers, and to top it all off they shouldn't be based at Singapore at all but rather the safer base in Sri Lanka.
For Chuchill to order the deployment flies in the face of the very report he had commissioned. For not cancelling the deployment while the ships were in S.Africa and it had become obvious that they had lost their carrier and any prospect of getting a replacement is really quite beyond belief .
The only good news from the whole debacle was that Churchills idea of adding HMS Centurion to force Z was overuled.