It’s tempting to cheer Jack Straw’s promise in the Commons this week that incitement to homophobic hatred is to be made a crime, along with incitement to racial or religious hatred. But I’m not so sure. Seriously threatening language – of any kind – is already a crime; but once the law starts limiting free speech in matters of honest opinion, where does it stop?

The Bible says homosexuality is an abomination; God puts the city of Sodom to the torch; the present Pope calls it a “disorder”. Such views, however civilly expressed, are inherently hate-inciting, but should their expression be a crime? Then why should we remain free to sneer, in ways inciting hatred, at a person’s being Welsh, or Irish?

“Spastic” or “cripple” are hateful expressions that nobody should use as insults, but if the use of “batty boy” or “queer” is to invite prosecution, what is the argument against making disablist insult a matter for the police too? And how about language that incites hatred of women?

Lines of absolute principle are hard to draw, but some groups may be so weak and fragile as to need the law’s protection from hateful speech. I’d like to think we gays are no longer among them.

Bottled it? On the contrary, Gordon Brown has just made the boldest decision of his life. It takes real guts to waver like this.

To leap from a speeding wagon when you’ve changed your mind about its direction requires nerve. At Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday – as close as the Commons gets to burning a man at the stake – Mr Brown struck me as briefly the bravest man in Britain. At his press conference the day before, repeating a flat lie while the missiles flew showed great courage, of a sort.

He needed it. Indecisive people always end up having to be brave because they get cornered by events. The apparently cautious is often truly reckless, and Brown’s timidity has pitched him into a huge gamble. He is staking everything on becoming more popular in the future than he was in the autumn of 2007. He has rejected the bird in the hand in favour of two in the bush. Audacious or what?

It was Brown’s “young bloods” who were motivated by true caution, and his “greybeards”, the hesitators, who have pushed him into what will one day be seen for what it was: foolhardy.

For a little series about political cliché that I made for the BBC Radio Westminster Hour before the party conferences, I interviewed Tom Clark, a former special political adviser to Cabinet ministers. Mr Clark told me that when aides write briefs for a minister facing a rough ride in the Commons, they include a section headed “I’LL TAKE NO LECTURES . . .”, a list of bad things to say about the individual who asks a question the minister cannot handle. For want of an answer he huffs and puffs at his critic’s cheek in even asking: “I’ll take no lectures about economics from an Hon Member who only got a C in mathematics at O level . . .”, etc. The “no lectures” section is placed at the end of the briefing: an “in emergency, break glass”, last-ditch line of defence.

So I was all attention as David Cameron rose to question Gordon Brown yesterday at PMQs. Did Brown really expect us to believe, he asked, that he would have called off the election even if he had been heading for a 100-seat majority?

A slight pause. “I’ll take no lectures . . .” began Mr Brown. To the lifeboats, then.

Last week’s Newsnight film about a black Kenyan comedy team called Redykyulass (Ridiculous) set me thinking. Their stand-up (and dance) routines mock the present and previous President and their wives, and are apparently amusing many Kenyans. The besetting weakness of sub-Saharan politics is the cult of the Big Man in African society, and here satire and ridicule, the obvious bubble-pricking antidote, have been in short supply. But why?

Casting my mind back to my secondary schooling in Swaziland, where many of my schoolmates were black, I remembered that the young Africans I knew, there and elsewhere on the continent, had a tremendous appetite for parody, satire and mockery, and a flair for it, especially mimicry. Africans (so far as one can generalise) find the lampooning of the high-and-mighty hilarious.

Why has this not impinged often on African politics? Could Redykyulass be a hopeful sign of satire to come? Western development aid should be diverted from building latrines and rechannelled into the discreet sponsorship of small comedy groups.

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