Britain is bringing HMS Belfast back into service to keep the French out of our fishing waters.

Govt wants gunboat diplomacy to maintain our sovereignty after Brexit.

But he has discovered decades of defence cuts means we have no gunboats.

In a cunning plan, worthy of anything Baldrick came up with in Blackadder, the Prime Minister has ordered HMS Belfast, now a museum piece by Tower Bridge, back into service.

Decommissioned in 1963, the engine room is currently being updated and the 12 six-inch guns greased up in preparation for “giving the French the fright of their lives”.

“Macron’s fishing fleet is in for a shock if it thinks it can hoover up our marine life any more,” claimed a Downing Street insider.

“HMS Belfast will be patrolling our seas ready to blast any filthy feisty Frenchman out of the water.”

But the news has not gone down well in France.

Appropriately named French fisheries minister Madame Lorraine Fisher, 34, said: “I don’t want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper!

“I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”