An Englishman, a Cuban, a Japanese man and a Pakistani were all on a train. The Cuban threw a fine Havana cigar out of the window, explaining: “They are ten a penny in my country.” The Japanese man threw out a Nikon camera out of the carriage, adding: “These are ten a penny in my country.” The Englishman then picked up the Pakistani and threw him out of the train window. When the other travellers asked him to account for his actions, he said: “They are ten a penny in my country”. Boom boom?

Not, in fact, the late and much-lamented-by-Jim-Bowen Bernard Manning, but the Conservative MP for Congleton, Ann Winterton, in a notorious quip that five years ago lost her her frontbench job (but not her seat).

She is probably not all that unrepresentative of a certain type of older Tory MP who considers all this sensitivity about black people and gays to be mere “political correctness”, a silly distraction from cutting taxes.

Glancing through the survey into the social attitudes of MPs published by The Times on Monday, against a backdrop of Tory protest at David Cameron’s attempts to reposition his party, it struck me that the Conservative Party needs to decide whether it wants in fact to continue to be Bernard Manning and Stan Boardman, or whether it might drag itself into the era at least of Victoria Wood, if not quite Catherine Tate.

Bernard Manning

Comedian whose brutal disregard for ‘normal’ sensibilities fell out of fashion but remained popular on the club circuit

Britain today is less Boardman (“F****** hell. I am being heckled by Pakis now. Why don’t you go back to your curry house or shop in Bradford? Your elephant’s waiting outside”), more Ricky Gervais (to a man in a wheelchair: “Thirty-one? You should be walking by now then”). Which is to say, if it’s offensive, it’s with a sort of wink; slicker, subtler and much smarter.

Modern comedy can be extraordinarily politically incorrect – look at Matt Lucas’s slutty single mother Vicky Pollard, or his only gay in the village, or Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G, let alone Borat – but it is a lot more clever about it than Manning was: “They actually think they’re English because they are born here. That means if a dog’s born in a stable, it is a horse.” That one he directed at the only black man in a 300-strong audience of whites.

Now come back to the poll of MPs conducted for The Times this week by Populus, and what it tells us about today’s Conservative backbencher. Where 59 per cent of Labour MPs think Britain a united country, only 22 per cent of Conservative MPs do. Where 98 per cent of Labour MPs consider Britain a better country to live than it was 20 years ago, only 41 per cent of Tories do.

The starkest gaps were on racial diversity. More than nine out of ten Labour MPs agreed that “the diverse mix of races, cultures and religions now found in our society has improved Britain”, but nearly a half of Conservatives disagreed. A call for people to be more tolerant of different ethnic groups and cultures found support from 94 per cent of Labour MPs but just two thirds of Conservatives. How can you oppose greater tolerance? And multiculturalism was backed by eight out of ten Labour backbenchers but rejected by the same proportion of Conservatives. Oh, and on gay rights, you have 83 per cent backing for equality from Labour compared with less than half of the Tories.

What an astonishing poll. What a negative, backward-looking, divisive and pessimistic view of Britain is contained in that profile of today’s Conservative MP. Compared with the attitudes of Britain as a whole, as polled by Populus two years ago on exactly the same questions, on the racial and equality issues Tory and Labour MPs are equally out of synch with the views of the country, but with this key difference: Labour MPs are massively more optimistic than the population as a whole, Tory MPs equally as starkly pessimistic.

Now who do you want to govern you, the optimist or the pessimist? The one who thinks we can be a united, progressive, diverse and tolerant nation, or the one who thinks the country went to the dogs (and the blacks, the Asians, “Europe”) long ago? The one who looks forward, or the one who thinks there’s nothing to be done?

This is what Mr Cameron is trying to teach his out-of-touch, negative, intolerant and divisive party. And this is what Mr Cameron had to spell out for them yet again this week: the reason why he has to move the Conservative Party back to the centre ground: “We stopped fooling ourselves that if we played the same old tunes we’d somehow get a different result.”

The point about the startling political incorrectness of modern comedy is that it assumes a certain set of attitudes of its audience: if Gervais or Lucas or Baron Cohen thought we were homophobic, or racist, or biased against the disabled, they wouldn’t go near those jokes. They are only possible because the country has moved so far since the days when Manning was tramping around the airwaves.

But has the Conservative Party? The point of the derided Alist of Conservative candidates was to try to broaden the Tory party in the House of Commons beyond Sir Humphrey Battleton and his bridge partners to progress towards selecting a more diverse, younger, darker range of candidates, to actually effect a change in the Parliamentary Party itself. Sure, the list wasn’t diverse enough, but it was a hell of a lot better than the current crop of MPs.

And Mr Cameron had to drop it after the party at large rebelled against it, just as it now threatens to rebel against him. If the Tory party turns against its leader now, pressurising him to retreat to its exclusively white male comfort zone and head off to the right again, it would prove its utter insanity and condemn itself to oblivion, the ancient butt of old jokes: “We’ve done gays and Nazis – that’s enough about the Conservative Party.” (Ricky Gervais).

For did you hear the Bernard Manning joke about the three Tory MPs? There was a white man, a white man and a white man . . .

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