If I had the space, I would have noticed that Latif’s dumb echo of the Israeli Right’s description of compatriots who disagree with the Netanyahu government’s treatment of the Palestinians as “self-hating Jews” would be funny in other circumstances. Here, I would have continued, it is just sick. Liberal Muslims such as Maajid Nawaz, who is denounced by both the religious Islamist Right and the illiberal white Left because he puts his body on the line to defend liberal democracy, and ex-Muslims such as Hirsi Ali are the true enemies. They think for themselves, they don’t fit the roles the directors of the theatre of identity politics assign them, so they must be damned.

I would thus have had much to say about Homegrown and its director. I would have taken them apart, one filthy, privileged prejudice at a time. But as I listened to Latif speak to an Arts Council seminar on censorship I learned that I wouldn’t have the chance to criticise. The NYT cancelled Latif’s show two days before it was due to open in the summer. The theatre’s artistic director, Paul Roseby, said: “The creatives have failed to meet repeated requests for a complete chronological script to justify their extremist agenda.”

Their decision is a sign of a change in the weather. Ever since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on Salmon Rushdie in 1989, threats to censor the arts and literature have come from outside the British state. Indeed, artists have often relied on the state for protection. The typical censor is an Islamist who threatens to kill an artist for failing to show proper respect to his myths. And very successful have their threats and the threats of other ethnic and religious extremists been in shutting down plays and exhibitions.

Now the British government has had enough. It is moving into the censorship business. It is telling universities that they must ban hate preachers — even if they are not inciting students to violence against women, Jews and homosexuals. The threat of Islamic State means that it is prepared to go into the once-forbidden area of suppressing prejudiced ideas rather than direct provocations to crime.

Lord knows, I understand the urge to laugh and say “I told you so, you bloody fools” to artists, students and academics who have for a generation banned speakers who were not inciting violence. All those who silenced opponents because some witchfinding prig decided that they were sexist, racist, transphobic, whorephobic or Islamophobic are now seeing the state treat them with the same disregard for essential liberal values. But, easy though it is to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of censors being censored, it won’t do.

At the end of her talk to the Arts Council Nadia Latif said that if Homegrown had been cancelled because of an Islamist threat, she would have been celebrated by those who profess to believe in freedom of speech. And she was right. Just because she wasn’t offending religious totalitarians does not mean, however, that the “irreducible right of all artists to make art” could be denied to her. And I think she was right on that too.

I think it, rather than know it, because I can never see her play. But if it is not an incitement to violence against Christians, Jews, women, gays and the other targets of radical Islam, then all of us who defend Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s freedom of speech must defend Nadia Latif’s too. For if we do not we will be as big a hypocrite as she is.