Campaigners cheer bold Trafalgar Square plinth decision

There were wild celebrations among the diversity-aware yesterday after it was announced that a hero of the struggle for the rights of those somewhat challenged on the physical front would remain in a prominent position at one of London's most famous squares.

"This is fantastic news," said Mary-Beth Galinksy of the Better One Than None Institute set up to fight for the rights of differently-abled men and women. "The statue is a beacon to millions in Britain and around the world. For too long it has been thought that only the conventionally beautiful and those with their full compliment of body parts should appear on such monuments."

Under the plan, the statue of the half-blind, one-armed Horatio Nelson will remain in Trafalgar Square for the foreseeable future and will not be replaced — as some had feared — by a modernist structure of physically-perfect excreting pigeons.

"Horatio Nelson — we prefer not to call him Lord — has set a fantastic example for other disabled people. Bloody hell, the bloke was shot to pieces and he still managed to seduce another man's wife and then go out and kill thousands of French sailors," Galinsky enthused to The Rockall Times.

"Right, I'm off for a cuppa," enthused another local official now responsible for not taking down the statue of Nelson that is atop a tall column in the middle of the square.

However, there was less praise from Galinksy for the proposed statue of a limbless woman with a baby that may soon be keeping Nelson company at Trafalgar Square: "The point of that I cannot understand. How the hell is she ever going to be able to command a warship? Or open the top of a bottle of Sunny D for her little mite, for that matter?"

London Mayor Ken Livingstone told us: "I'm glad this controversy has been resolved thanks to the congestion charge that I successfully introduced and which is now being copied across the world."