Last week, a new play, Plague over England, opened to critical acclaim in a non-West End theatre of London. The plot is centred on an incident in 1953, when the actor, Sir John Gielgud, was charged and pleaded guilty to “importuning for immoral purposes” in a Chelsea public lavatory. Although Sir John tried to conceal his real identity and was advised by the magistrate to immediately go and see a doctor and cure himself, the case inevitably made it to the front pages of newspapers.

Predictably, there was a huge onrush of moral indignation. With memories of the Cambridge spy scandal involving Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean still fresh, the home secretary, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, warned of a homosexual “plague over England” and the Lord Chief Justice lamented that there wasn’t enough of either god or the rod in the country. In the House of Lords, then dominated by hereditary peers, an angry 6th Earl Winterton demanded that Sir John be stripped of his knighthood and horsewhipped in public.

What is striking about this 55-year-old case, for which Sir John was admonished for being a “silly old bugger” by one of the leading actresses of the day, is not so much the familiarity of the “crime” but the forthright responses of the establishment. Almost everyone of consequence, it would seem, had a view that they were not afraid of expressing publicly. There was no suggestion of either a conspiracy of silence or squeamishness, hallmarks of Victorian and contemporary Britain respectively.

The contrast between 1953 and 2008 was driven home by another trivial incident last week involving another Conservative hereditary peer. Speaking in a debate on the national health service, the 50-year-old Lord Mancroft recounted his experiences of a public hospital in Bath: “The nurses who looked after me were mostly grubby — we are talking about dirty fingernails and hair — and were slipshod and lazy. Worst of all, they were drunken and promiscuous.

“If you are a patient in bed and you are being nursed from either side, they talk across you as if you are not there. So I know what they got up to the night before, how much they drank and what they were planning to get up to the next night. It’s pretty horrifying.”

Lord Mancroft’s insights into lifestyles of today’s Florence Nightingales are no doubt the stuff of postprandial banter in the gentlemen’s clubs. They would be a refreshing departure from the fulminations against hapless traffic wardens for whom, as I was recently informed, English is at best a “fourth language”. Yet, by the rules of today’s society, there are definite no-go areas (we like to call them “holy cows” in India) for men and women in public life. Nursing, like immigration, racial profiling and the principle of progressive taxation, happens to be one of those things that can’t be discussed without a generous dose of pre-censorship, because departures from prevailing fashion can’t really be countenanced.

The good Lord Mancroft has been barraged with demands for an apology and the populist media has dubbed him the “potty peer”, comparable in the scale of Blimpishness to, say, the former Earl Winterton. His position in contemporary Britain is about as untenable as that of those in India who look upon Matthew Hayden’s “obnoxious little weed”-description of the excitable Harbhajan Singh as a piece of competitive banter — hardly worth getting shirty about. Lord Mancroft runs the distinct risk of either being bonked on the head while walking his dog or having a brick thrown into his car window by some doughty class warrior.

What hitherto distinguished a liberal society from an earnest (but not necessarily illiberal) society like India is that it accommodated both dissidence and eccentricity. Actually, both societies should have evolved in tandem because they share a common distaste for certitudes. There is little, for example, by way of rigid dogma in the Church of England. As Jeremy Paxton pointed out in his book on Englishness, a pointed theological query to an old-fashioned English clergyman invariably elicited the response, “Well it all rather depends…” Last week, at a seminar in Cambridge on religion and politics, I was prompted into a similar response when asked by a Muslim radical to delineate the specific components of the Hindu mind.

The right to take side swipes and lace self-perception with a sense of humour is the key difference between the liberal and the earnest. The earnest person takes his own utterances very seriously and is prone to prickliness at even the mildest criticism, especially when made by a foreigner. For reasons that were grounded in a blend of supreme self-confidence, superciliousness and smugness, the Anglo-Saxon character included a generous measure of liberalism; the Indian, on the other hand, couldn’t quite take full advantage of his theological inheritance because he couldn’t get rid of a big chip on his post-colonial shoulder. Today, thanks in no small measure to post-war immigration, dollops of earnestness have crept into public life in Britain. An obsessive concern with someone else’s sensitivities has cramped Albion’s style and made public discourse less eccentric.

Yet, there are moments that irreverence claws its way back. Last Tuesday, I attended a small party at The Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury to celebrate a book on the contentious “God question” by Martin Rowson, one of Britain’s most delightfully provocative cartoonists.

According to Rowson, the idea for the book took shape after he was introduced to a good vicar as the proverbial Atheist At The Party: “The vicar — wearing a collar and tie and a tweed jacket, all the better to trap the unwary — looked me up and down and then leant back with a contemptuous and patronising smile and asked me, as an atheist, how I explained the fact that religion was a universal phenomenon in all human societies. Quick as a flash, and without ever really having thought about it before, I asked him how he could explain exactly the same idea about keeping pets.”

The Dog Allusion: Pets, Gods and How to be Human is an enthrallingly crazy monograph that equates veneration of god with the age-old human love for non-humans, particularly dogs and cats. Rowson’s argument is logically compelling: “As I say, for whatever reason, we love our pets. A lot of us love them much more than we love other people, and some of us may even love them more than we love the god or gods we profess to love. But the real point of all this is that, although it’s not often true of other people, in the case of pets and gods, we invariably think they love us back.” The book, naturally, is dedicated to the numerous cats and dogs of the Rowson household, “all of whom died without receiving last rites”.

Rowson has a cartoonist’s mind: he is able to extrapolate the absurd from the seemingly normal. He is naturally provocative, perhaps too provocative for earnest societies where it would be blasphemous to equate the love of god with the love for your pet dog. At the same time, Rowan’s assertion that the believer has a moral equivalence with the non-believer seems almost Hindu in its construct.

The tolerance of intellectual heresy — to be distinguished from the violent extremism of the Osama fan club — is the hallmark of civility and liberalism.

All over the world we seem to be losing this great strength. This is why I chuckled over the self-professed atheist and secularist Rowson’s simple dedication in my copy of his book: “God bless”.