THE gods of Mount Kinbalu are right to be angry. No, I haven’t turned into a religious fundamentalist: the mountain gods are not beings; they are the spiritual intuitions and sensitivities of the people who live on and beside the sacred mountain.

And it is these intuitions and sensitivities that have been offended by the crass behaviour of the western tourists who stripped off and took photographs of one another. At the very least, members of the local tribes deserve an apology.

I cast around for a corresponding act at which we here in Britain might take offence. What if foreigners came over and spat in the font in Westminster Abbey? That would be deeply offensive, surely? I don’t know though – I suspect there would be more than a few who would think it was quite a “cool” thing to do. A bit of a laff.

Suppose a crowd of French tourists gathered outside Buckingham Palace and shouted anti-royalist slogans? Well, for a start, I think most French people would be too well-mannered to do such a thing. But again I suspect most native English people would just shrug and refuse to make a fuss.

So I was getting stuck for an answer. What would we find offensive? What, in fact, do we hold as sacred?

Not the churches and chapels certainly. Not the name of God or Jesus. We’re quite capable of taking their names in vain ten times before lunch. Not our statues and monuments, for we have seen recently that we’re willing to deface these sites ourselves – if, for instance, we are upset by the general election result. I thought for hours, then at last I think I hit on a couple of things that the thoroughly secularised, profane and terminally dumbed-down British would find outrageous.

Hordes would be furious if a foreigner, having good taste, pulled the plug from the amplifier at the Glastonbury Festival. Or if another visitor, appalled by the vulgarity of Britain’s Got Talent or Strictly Come Dancing, threw a punch at the TV screen. Either of those acts of iconoclasm would be sufficient to cause a 5.9 strength earthquake.

For we have our own tribes in Britain today and they are a lot more primitive and barbaric than the cultivated agricultural animists of Malaysia. Our barbarians affect sophistication, some even go to university and read for degrees in aeronautics – as the former public schoolgirl turned temporary stripper Eleanor Hawkins did. And these posh and privileged oiks are not fifteen years old and in the first fit of adolescent madness. Ms Hawkins is twenty-four and her friends are of similar age. Shouldn’t they understand that it is not clever to offend your hosts, all for the sake of a childish prank and a giggle?

Now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and consider the rituals of our home-grown primitive tribes. Their gods are their gadgets and their desire for self-advertisement: their sacraments are mobile phones and their membership of Facebook and Twitter. Their religious rites involve, as we have seen, taking off their clothes. Then what do they do? Do they indulge in a grand old pagan orgy? They most certainly do not. Instead, they send out nude photographs of themselves and their friends on social media. What, finally, are our home-grown, middle-class British tribes called? They are two in number: the Infantilised Tribe and the Tribe of Narcissists.

One report says that the Malaysian mountain people have asked for ten buffalo as compensation. Cheap at the price. But not as cheap as that impolite strip.