ONE of my favourites of the old Monty Python sketches is the one where they invent a joke so funny that anyone hearing it will laugh himself to death.

They end up using it as a weapon of war.

I was reminded of this the other day when I read about Harriet Harman’s Equality Act, which threatens to ban jokes altogether. One section of this Act is designed to prevent people being offended at work.

So if you tell a joke and someone takes offence, he can run off to the lawyers and claim damages.

But it’s actually much more extreme than that: even if you don’t hear the offending joke, but learn later that it was told, you can claim, retrospectively as it were, that you are offended.

Will anyone dare tell jokes ever again? The first thing to be said about this latest piece of social engineering and ideological bossiness is that most jokes are meant to be offensive to some degree.

Nearly all jokes feature some minority as the recipient of mockery and I can remember as a kid in short trousers hearing my first joke beginning: “There was an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman...” Or stuff like: “There was this man with one leg...” Or: “This deaf old woman...” We never used to think that these jokes were designed to stir up hatred, or that they were racist and sexist.

The point about jokes featuring minorities is that they can be told against anyone: for each one of us is, in one way or another, a member of many minority groups. I’m a parson, for instance, but I don’t come over all offended when someone in the pub starts a joke: “Have you heard the one about the vicar and the tart...”

There are even worse sections of the Equality Act. Employers are ordered by it to “promote diversity”. But I suggest that if you intend to get people to work for you and you are paying them the wages, it’s entirely up to you whom you employ. Why can’t governments be made to stay out of matters which are none of their business?

Worse, at interviews, employers will not even be allowed to ask a candidate for a job about how fit he is. But, given the ideological bias of people like Ms Harman, you must understand that there is no similar obligation put upon the potential employee to disclose the fact that, well, actually, he has a weak ankle and no head for heights, so he mustn’t be asked to go up ladders or even more than one flight of stairs.

We have become a controlled society, hemmed in by rules and diktats formed according to the prejudices of the parties that govern us. There is hardly a corner of any town where you are not on CCTV. Age-old traditional practices can be banned at a stroke on the whim of some apparatchik – like the ancient cheese-rolling competition in Gloucestershire.

There are so many regulations governing school trips that in many schools such outings have ceased altogether. We need a bonfire of regulations and a revolution to end all this control freakery.

I hope you won’t sue me if I end with a joke.

Have you heard the one about the vicar and the tart? The vicar says to the tart: “I prayed for you last night, Rita.” And she says: “Oh, you needn’t do that, vicar – I’ll give you my phone number.”

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.