Last week on the BBC’s Question Time, a member of the audience asked whether it was right for the State to prevent a Christian couple fostering children because they believe in traditional sexual morality.

The question was prompted by a High Court ruling which held that Eunice and Owen Johns couldn’t foster children under equality legislation because of their beliefs concerning homosexuality and sex outside marriage.

A range of opinions was expressed on the subject. Former Labour Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett and Tory Welfare and Pensions Secretary said that foster parents should not be allowed to push their views on children in their care.

But the most impassioned defence of the couple came from prominent historian Professor David Starkey. Professor Starkey, a noted atheist, and a homosexual said he had “profound doubts” about the case.

He said: “It seems to me that what we’re doing with this case is producing a tyrannous new morality that is every bit as oppressive as the old.”

He noted that when he was young, “being gay was very difficult, it was frowned upon”.

But he added: “But I am very, very concerned that a new sort of liberal morality is coming in which is, as I said, as intolerant, is as oppressive and intrusive into family life.”

He referred to the case of Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian guesthouse owners who were fined for refusing to allow a homosexual couple to have a room together because of their religious belief that extramarital sex is wrong.

He said that the way to deal with such a situation was for the couple in question was “not to ban them, not to fine them”.

“It is for them simply to put up what seems to me to be a quite proper notice in a small, privately run hotel, which says ‘We are Christians and this is what we believe’,” Professor Starkey said.

“Otherwise, as I say, we are producing a new tyranny.”

Professor Starkey, it should be added, isn’t a shrinking violet about expressing his views about religion. He once asked his fellow panellists on BBC radio show The Moral Maze about a Church of England cleric, ‘Doesn’t he genuinely make you want to vomit? His fatness, his smugness, his absurdity.’ Not for nothing was he dubbed at one point the rudest man in Britain.

But despite that, Professor Starkey is able to clearly see that underneath the current rhetoric and tolerance there exists totalitarian tendency, which is ultimately profoundly intolerant and oppressive. It is a useful insight, and coming from him it certainly cannot be dismissed as mere special pleading.