The tall ship Grand Turk, standing in for HMS Victory , passes the French aircraft carrier Charles De Gaulle during celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid /Getty Images
Take note of the Trafalgar celebrations on the Solent today. It is one of the very few occasions when you can deride anything that includes more than 100 warships and the Duke of Edinburgh as political correctness gone mad.
On one side, Adam Nicolson, a Guardian columnist, finds the jamboree as unthinkable as a historical re-enactment of the first world war bloodbath of Passchendale. On the other, Anna Tribe, the 75-year-old great, great, great granddaughter of Lord Nelson, complains tonight's mock Napoleonic sea battle does not go far enough. Rather than the planned skirmish between red and blue fleets, she wants a straight ahead pummelling of French warships by those of Great Britain. "I am anti political correctness - very much against it," she said.
The political incorrectness (and therefore, the logic goes, moral rightness) of battering, even symbolically, the navy of one of your closest allies and political partners is something of which many are sure. Alex Naylor, the man who plays Nelson, told the Sun that "obliterating history for sake of political correctness [means] you can't learn from the past."
Notwithstanding the fact that French warships come to English waters in peace rather than to invade suggests lessons have been learned, who knows if the French would have made the short journey over the Channel to see the tricolore in flames?
Such a move would mean a more complete end to past animosities than red and blue teams, but also an absence of the feelings of national pride that the anti-PC lobby are so keen to bemoan the loss of. There may be sensitivities here for a reason.
Tonight's display is essentially a rock concert for Navy buffs, a Live 8 of the high seas with blazing broadsides, gun smoke and pyrotechnics on the Solent. The deeper meaning, the one both the French and British naval commands want to get across, is that we're all friends now and do a lot of important work together. French Vice Admiral Jacques Mazars, in charge of five ships, called it "a festival of the sea". There are no doubt those who would think this politically correct nonsense.
