Sir Edwin Landseer forsook the opportunity to be a truly inclusive artist when he made all of the lions at the foot of Nelson’s column able-bodied. Or at least, able-bodied so far as we are able to discern. It maybe that one or two of them are afflicted by hidden infirmities which would these days classify them as being disabled.

That lion on the left, for example, gazing implacably towards the Mall: is there an intimation of stress in its frozen rigidity? Today stress is, officially, a disability — so perhaps I am underestimating Landseer and he was actually being more subtle than I gave him credit for.

The easy option would have been to put a couple of the lions in wheelchairs or put a white cane in one of the lion’s paws — so perhaps Landseer had a more modernist take on disability. Maybe another lion is — silently, invisibly, bravely — suffering the effects of whiplash. It’s for us to decide, I suppose. Disability is in the eye of the beholder.

The chap towering over the lions is, unquestionably, inclusive. An eye lost in cavalier fashion at Calvi, a head wound inflicted during the battle of the Nile that sent him a bit mental, an internal rupture sustained at St Vincent and, of course, the famously absent arm, resulting from an ill-advised escapade at Tenerife. That’s four compelling disabilities in one.

It would be nice to think that our forefathers bunged up the statue of Nelson precisely in order to celebrate disability; but I suspect it was more to do with all those battles he won for his country.

Just along from the good admiral we can now gaze upon a marble effigy of a pregnant woman called Alison Lapper who has never, so far as I am aware, routed the Spanish, the French or the Danes. But she is certainly disabled, as evidenced by a comprehensive absence of limbs. Lapper, who seems an agreeable and doughty sort, has said that the statue is “a modern tribute to femininity, disability and motherhood”.

A tribute to disability? Why would we wish to pay tribute to disability; if we’re being honest, isn’t disability bad, wouldn’t we rather not have it at all? The answer, I suppose, is that some would and some wouldn’t. We are reminded of the deaf people who cried traitor when Jack Ashley, the deaf former MP, announced that he was to have a cochlea transplant so that he could hear for the first time. Jack, you were better off deaf and you’re letting the rest of us down, came the response from fundamentalists in the hard-of-hearing community.

It is a perplexing attitude — that one might actually be better off with disability. But it is the logical extension to the old empowerment argument that one is not physically worse off being disabled, merely different, and that terms such as “suffering from” and “afflicted by” should be expunged in favour of the frankly bizarre “living with”. As if disablement were a neutral state or simply the result of a personal lifestyle choice.

“I have chosen to live with blindness,” you might remark casually, as you tap your white cane along the pavement, much as you might announce that you had chosen to live with, say, Jordan — or with Ashley. It is disability seen as another glorious version of diversity, like being black or gay.

Today we are enjoined almost to exult in disability. And the gap between what constitutes being disabled, or differently abled, is artificially narrowed by the week. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Paralympic Games where, not so long ago, the mentally handicapped Spanish basketball team, which won the gold medal, was stripped of its honour because the team members were not mentally handicapped at all, they were merely Spanish. Nobody was able to tell the difference until much later.

According to the latest official statistics, almost one in five of us in Britain is disabled and some of the disablement lobbyists insist that the figure is as high as one in three. To give some indication of the fashionableness of being crippled, maimed or afflicted, there was a 25% increase in the number of people claiming disability living allowance between 1998 and 2003. Ministers insist much of this was down to greater “take-up”.

It is also down to an enormous broadening of what it takes to be designated “disabled”. There seems to be an aspiration that one day we might all be happily disabled and that when this sunlit upland is finally attained, the real iniquities suffered by people born without arms or legs, or with cerebral palsy or blindness, might somehow be assuaged or ameliorated. Perhaps that is what is meant by the title of the leading magazine of the disabled lobby: Disability Now. It may be an imperative rather than a mere statement.

I do not like the statue of Lapper in Trafalgar Square. Not because, as some critics have argued, it is a poor work of art by Marc Quinn; “slimy” and “machine made”. I do not like it because I do not wish to revel in disability. I do not think disability is something that deserves a “tribute”. The ugliness lies not in Lapper’s actual form — something we are easily able to accommodate when we gaze upon her neighbour, Nelson — but in the delusional ideology behind it.

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