The meetings of the all-party Anglo-Danish friendship group may be riotous occasions, full of ribald humour fuelled by free-flowing schnapps. Somehow I doubt it. In which case, Ann Winterton deserved to be stripped of the Tory party’s whip for committing the error that no stand-up comedian or politician (they are not always one and the same) can afford to make. Misjudging the audience can spell death for any comedian, whether in the Comedy Club or the Houses of Parliament (they are rarely one and the same).

That her childish joke about sharks and dead Chinese cockle-pickers was in poor taste cannot be disputed, but she is unlikely to have made it up herself. A patron of the Keep Sunday Special Campaign, that aims to keep most shops shut on the Sabbath, and parliamentary member of the Hairdressing Council, Mrs Winterton is not renowned for her creative imagination. So the likelihood is that someone told her the joke or e-mailed it to her.

In private, or in the company of those they know and feel comfortable with, people will laugh at all sorts of things which might make others flinch with horror. Mrs Winterton’s extraordinary error was to assume that a bad taste, juvenile joke would go down well with assorted MPs and Danish guests. Some of them, in the right circumstances, might have been tempted to titter but a parliamentary dinner intended to build relationships between Britain and Denmark was surely not the occasion. The Danes were probably bemused by British humour, the Britons embarrassed.

It is stretching the imagination to turn Mrs Winterton’s silliness into a terrible racist jibe, although she should have learnt from previous experience that the politically correct will seize on any mention of nationality as the basis for accusations of racism. The unfunny story she told at a gathering in 2002, which culminated in the punchline that Pakistanis were “ten a penny” in Britain, certainly provided the PCs with easy ammunition. It might have been well received by some of the guests at the rugby dinner, who had probably heard very much worse in their changing rooms, but it was bound to travel beyond the restaurant, just as Tuesday night’s joke did.

Having been MP for Congleton since 1983, Mrs Winterton might have been expected to have grasped by now that a politician’s remarks come under more scrutiny than those of a local league scrum half. Yet political correctness now exerts such a grip on the country that almost anyone saying anything that the po-faced PC police disapprove of is likely to find himself under attack as racist, sexist, or homophobic, or a combination of these vices.

What passes as normal banter among colleagues in some offices could easily become a disciplinary offence in another working environment. Professor Christie Davies, a sociologist who has made jokes the subject of his academic career, has just published a serious tome in defence of tasteless and offensive gags. He argues that they are harmless and do not cause ethnic tension. Mrs Winterton would find his book a mine of potential new material.

He is certainly correct in his contention that the publicly prevailing attitude as to what is acceptable humour allows through an enormous amount of sexual innuendo which some people find far more offensive than any barracking of national stereotypes. And it us not only national stereotypes that can cause upset. Some of the stereotypes that were paraded daily on the nation’s television screens in the name of humorous entertainment in I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! offended my sensibilities. They should undoubtedly have been bleeped out, even when they were not saying anything. Former drug addicts and glamour models exposing their shallow inarticulateness are deeply offensive on prime time or any time.

Yet we have allowed a minority to impose a form of censorship which is now widely assented to. The decree is that there should be a liberal attitude towards smut but traditional jokes about other races and nationalities are outlawed. The type of humour which now wings its way around the internet makes it perfectly clear that there the majority are not offended by the sort of jokes that have been told in pubs and classrooms for centuries. Most, however, have learned that they need to be sure of their audience before indulging such humour in public. The Gestapo could be waiting to pounce on any injudicious comic.

Mrs Winterton has refused to be browbeaten into curbing her tongue. But even if she did not judge her latest joke as offensive, she should have realised that others would, even if only after prompting. To try to raise a laugh at the expense of those pitiful souls who were killed in Morecambe Bay so recently was not racist, merely crass and callous. Although they were not in the room at the time, families and friends of the cockle-pickers would undoubtedly be appalled if they were to hear of her story. So, even if she was intent on defending her right to tell the story, however much it bombed with the audience, she should surely have understood the need to apologise, and to do so with genuine feeling, for any offence it might have caused.

That she refused to do so when urged to by her party leader, Michael Howard, was not going to be seen as a joke by anyone and her punishment was inevitable.

She may also find that her dinner invitations now dry up. Mrs Winterton does not only espouse friendly relations with Denmark: she belongs to a raft of theall-party country groups that exist in Parliament. She shares her involvement in many of these with her husband, and fellow MP, Nicholas. Together, they are friends of Finland, Sweden, St Helena and the Bahamas. No doubt she gleans plentiful material for her repertoire from their meetings.