Nelson's beautiful flagship, still preserved at Portsmouth, has for years been a grave affront to our French allies. Her boastful name must annoy them even more. She is a solid reminder, made of English oak, of our lasting triumph over France at Trafalgar in , which changed the future of the world. It must be far more annoying to Paris than an unfinished submarine named after the Battle of Agincourt, which almost nobody in England has even heard of these days.
The sub's planned name is now deemed tactless so the boat is to be re-christened after Achilles โ an ancient Greek who almost certainly owned slaves.
His Majesty King Charles โ so politically correct that he sometimes resembles a walking bottle of hand sanitiser โ is said to have pressed for this emollient, drippy change of name and the Starmer Government, always in the market for a national climbdown, has agreed.
Let us see how this turns out. For the Age Of Daftness is well-advanced already and there is much more of this sort of thing waiting to happen. He won all his battles and was so much in the thick of combat himself that he had only one arm and one working eye left by the time he died.
The bluejackets who showed visitors around the ship dwelt on the thrill of battle and on the death of Nelson at the moment of triumph, sneakily shot down by a French marine high up on the mizzen mast of the French man-o-war Redoutable. The last time I went aboard Victory, the tour was mostly about flogging, the press gang and weevils in the biscuits.
