As a Brasenose PPEist I’m probably breaking the college spirit by speculating against only our second Prime Minister. In recent weeks, however, it seems that the Conservative leadership isn’t as clever or canny or even conservative as we’ve been told. Whisper it softly, but Cameron will surely not be a two-term PM, even if we see a two-term government.

First the Coalition alienated the public through NHS reform and the 45p tax cut for the 1%. Then in a panic-stricken attempt to win them back the Tories sought to re-establish their centrist credentials through ritually humiliating their base: the granny tax, gay marriage, and a perceived servility to marauding Lib Dem ministers.

The results are predictable – Labour leads the Tories by ten points and Cameron’s personal rating is abysmal, flattered only by Ed’s. The philosophy of government pursued by the Coalition appears masochistic, but it’s not intentional. This recklessness is a consequence of the tension between the traditionalists and the modernisers; between shire Tories and the ‘Notting Hill’ set of social liberals who inhibit the upper echelons of the Party. Those tribes haven’t been able to reconcile their divisions, resulting in a clinical PR job which barely masked instincts that the public still finds unpleasant.

Modernisation is great. It worked for New Labour who won three thumping majorities. Doubtless the Conservatives needed to widen their appeal and convey a social purpose. Yet Cameron’s modernisation – the ‘detoxification’ of the brand – was half-baked. Riding huskies and hugging hoodies may have blunted the teeth of the ‘nasty party’, but it didn’t speak to aspirational working classes who, whilst deserting Labour in droves, didn’t turn Blue.

Twenty years have passed since the Conservatives last won an election outright. 2015 is the last opportunity for the current leadership to demonstrate its worth. But it’s tough to see how they can. The Tories failed to win in 2010 owing to a chronic lack of support amongst three groups which they are now systematically alienating – the public sector, ethnic minorities and the country north of Birmingham. Oh yes, and women. The vilification of Sayeeda Warsi, Conservative co-chair, by backbenchers has been a particularly nasty demonstration of latent prejudice in the party.

Tim Montgomerie, the influential founder of the grass-roots web phenomenon Conservativehome, last week asked prominent right-wingers from media, business and Parliament who they wanted after Dave. The results tell us more about the party today than tomorrow. Hague and Boris do well; Osborne doesn’t. Priti Patel – a relative unknown – actually beat the Chancellor. She wasn’t the only female right-winger to poll strongly. In the absence of success the right has become nostalgic. The conclusion that the Party is ‘yearning for another Thatcher’ seems apt. If Cameron’s Coalition continues to mess things up, we may get one.

To the casual observer, the atmosphere in the streets of Cairo is ‘business as usual’. The tents are gone from Tahrir square, Fridays are dedicated to prayer rather than protest, and rage is more frequently directed at fellow road users than the ruling élite. Western media attention has largely moved on to more headline-worthy destinations. Compared with the cataclysmic scenes of last year, the current symptoms of Egypt’s ongoing passage to democracy – anti-military graffiti and posters of unphotogenic presidential candidates- seem tame. Egypt has achieved much of what its revolution set out to do.

After Hosni Mubarak was removed, the country has suspended its old constitution, seen a proliferation of independent media and conducted its first free and fair parliamentary elections. Indeed, many believe that the end is now in sight, for the election of the country’s President in May will supposedly mark the end of military rule and complete the transition to civilian government. But Egypt is not yet out of the woods. The decisions to be made in the coming months will define the new political order, and risks abound.

The growing influence of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, which took almost half the seats in the recent parliamentary election, is cause for concern among Egypt’s liberals and minorities. The Brotherhood’s latest pluralistic rhetoric remains unconvincing. True, the leaders of its Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) went carol singing at Cairo Cathedral last Christmas, but went on to stuff the Constitutional Assembly with their supporters last month.

The Brotherhood denied using its parliamentary dominance to hijack the panel that will write Egypt’s new charter, but the numbers speak for themselves: 65 of the 100 seats went to Muslims, and a mere six apiece to women and Christians.

The Brotherhood’s opponents fear that the Islamists seek to strengthen Article II of the current constitution, which declares Egypt an Islamic state. 25 liberal members walked out of the Assembly’s first meeting at the end of March, pledging to write an alternative constitution ‘in collaboration with all the segments of society’. It remains to be seen whether their demands will be met.

Elsewhere, the Brotherhood’s determination to maximise its political leverage is even more overt. In the latest chapter of its showdown with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the FJP drafted a no-confidence motion against Egypt’s interim government, increasing pressure on the military to appoint a Cabinet led by the parliament’s majority; that is, themselves.

At the beginning of this month, the Brotherhood casually revealed via Facebook that they would be fielding their own candidate, deputy leader Khairat al-Shater, in the upcoming presidential race. In doing this, they reneged on a key and repeated promise of their campaign in the parliamentary election. Many believed that the controversy surrounding the group could soar no higher. That was until the announcement that not one but two Brotherhood contenders would be entering.

In a statement made on 7th April, one day before the registration deadline, the group said: “Because we are protecting the success of the revolution and all of its goals … we have decided to nominate [party leader] Mohammed Morsi as our back-up candidate for president.’ Though the final outcome of both these political manoeuvres is still unclear, the ambition of the Muslim Brotherhood is not. One way or another they seek to dominate both the executive and the legislative wings of government in a new regime that they have designed.

Another big question mark hangs over Egypt’s military. The puppet civilian government established last March has made little attempt to hide the fact that the SCAF is still in charge. Though held up as heroes at the time of Mubarak’s overthrow, the military have since shown neither love for nor even understanding of democracy. Military trials have continued unabated, and dangerously vague emergency laws remain in place.

The police and soldiers responsible for the 800 dead and 11,000 wounded in January’s revolution have not even been investigated. Indeed, violence against protesters has continued throughout the year. The Maspero Massacre of October 2011 saw over two dozen protesters, predominantly Christian, killed by military and police forces. An originally peaceful sit-in outside the Cabinet building was met by army bullets, killing at least 14. Many remain doubtful that a new government will be able to limit the power of an institution that has dominated Egypt’s politics for over half a century and, according to some analysts, still controls up to 40% of the economy.

Beset by power-hungry fundamentalists and generals accustomed to dictatorship, Egypt’s fledgling democracy is far from secure. Economic stagnation and latent sectarian tensions could drag the country down even if democracy is established. Egypt’s revolution has come a long way. But it is far from over.

Suppose you’re an atheist.You’ve decided you’re not worried about getting on with disapproving God, or stamping out religion in its various forms. You just want to be happy, and get on with having a decent life. Fantastic! Off you go. And a few weeks later, as you smoke cigarettes at 4am and try to relax, you find yourself thinking ‘What am I doing with my life?’ What now?

This is a normal, human feeling. At least, I hope it is, because otherwise I’ve got far more problems than I thought I did. Let’s assume it is. I’ll assume that sleep-destroying, relationship-wrecking, miserable, paralytic anxiety is something of a default state for humanity. Bleak. What the hell? People live like this?

Except, people didn’t always live like this. The base-state of anxiety was the same, but when you felt confused you had something to hold on to – organised religion. They say it helps to keep suicidally depressed people busy – arrange cinema trips, so that their future is partially mapped out, partially contingently existing, as well as including some positive things. And 100 years ago, organised religion could provide something similar – some structure, some stability.  

But you’re an atheist. So you can’t participate in any of these regular meetings of strangers, and these occasions that draw family members together from across the country to exchange gifts, any of these rituals of reflection on life itself. You can’t enjoy any religious literature, any religious architecture, draw on thousands of years of moral thought. So what do you do?

Alain de Botton has an answer, which he presented to a full house at the Oxford Literary Festival, in my interview with him, and in his new book, Religion for Atheists. That answer is simple – crib / borrow / steal the features of religion that can be separated from doctrine, and put them into practice in your own life. To de Botton, religions are ‘buffets’. He explained, “Some of my critics have accused me of practicing the buffet style of philosophy.. and here they’re absolutely right. I see religion before me as a buffet and I take my plate and I eat the nicest bits.”

To de Botton religions are not without flaws – he is firm and precise in saying that religion is no excuse for intolerance. But he argues that it is the intolerance that is bad in those cases, rather than simply all of religion. And in the same way that there are parts of certain religions we might want to remove from society, there are also parts that could be worth saving.

One response would be to call this approach condescending – what gives anyone the right to tell anyone else how to live? Why do we even need to be told what to do? De Botton responds with scepticism to the idea that we all feel that we’re in control of our lives, a view you don’t normally hear in the public sphere. Waxing on the concept of a soul, he told me, “I like the concept of original sin. Original sin is a really helpful idea. It insists that the human being is broken, that humans are insufficient and incapable of perfection.

‘That’s the starting point of original sin.  And that’s a really good way to start, let’s say, a relationship. Imagine you have two young, beautiful, perfect people – they’re going to have a terrible relationship.  If you get together going ‘Look, I’m completely broken’ and ‘Oh good, well I am too’ you’ll be much happier.”

I feel like this is a sentiment that is almost never expressed. Again, that could just be because no one really feels like that, and I really should be paying someone to help me work through such feelings. But as de Botton points out, working through such insecurities has been one of the goals of religion, and working through these insecurities should in fact be a goal for all of us. And even if they take a path that starts at supernatural doctrine and follow it all the way to intolerance, there are parts of that journey which any right-thinking secular individual will surely see as useful and separable from the unwanted features.  

In his 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains his prospect theory, an alternative to economic theories that assume ideal rationality on the part of an agent. Humans are not ideally rational – we can strive to be, but we can be influenced by biases about what’s valuable, what we say is important. These biases are created outside of the decisions themselves. It may be that if we want to change our behaviour, we ought to shape our biases, rather than pursue rationally ideal decision making. How de Botton talks about the use of religion for atheists suggests ways that we can shape our biases using the tropes of religion.

The point is not where our views come from, but their own worth. He accepts it as true that anything you can pick out from religion you can also get from Wordsworth. However, de Botton argues, “It’s true, Wordsworth says a lot of this – he’s all about the fecundity of the earth and the cycle of the seasons and all the rest of it. There’s one major problem that the secular world forgets about Wordsworth and others and that point is that, not to be rude, none of us read Wordsworth.

‘The reason that we don’t read Wordsworth is that we mean to but we never get around to it.  We read a little bit at University but we’re very busy.  Religions know that about us: that’s why they think that we need that diary, we need a chronology of spiritually important things, and I think, from a secular point of view, that that’s fascinating and thought-provoking.”

Religions are for de Botton prototypes of secular moral institutions. They are structured, they are ordered, they are clear, and they are supportive. They are of course not ‘right’ – although who knows what that would actually mean in the context of a moral decision. But there is no reason an atheist might think of a religion as ‘wrong’, as well as accepting that its believers have their personal lives far more together than they could manage on their own.

De Botton ultimately wants us to bring  morality back. ‘We are too easily frightened. So often, anytime that someone proposes a valid idea in this area, people say, but what about Hitler, or Stalin. This is not the choice. We can have public morality without fascism, we can even have certain kinds of censorship without dictatorship, we can have great civic architecture which isn’t done by governments for their own glory.

For de Botton, Atheism doesn’t have to mean nihilism, and he tell me, ‘We don’t need to abandon ourselves to freemarket capitalism under the spiritual leadership of cable television.’

How does Boris Johnson’s decision to ban the adverts for ‘post-gay therapy’ make you feel? Are you worried that the ‘liberal’ values imposed on you by those London types are really just a way to undermine the culture you grew up to love?  Well, if so, The Daily Mail is as ever ready and waiting to let you know that you are not alone, and to calm your fears with its traditional mix of homespun values and shrieking outrage. It reminds us that “people ought not to be reproached, much less punished, for the way they are born.”

But, feigning reason, the paper ventures that “they can be legitimately asked not to act on their aberrant tendencies”, which, in any case are barely tendencies at all as “only about one percent of us are that way inclined”, and anyway “homosexuality is obviously a departure from the norm”. They finish with a call to arms that sounds a teeny bit hyperbolic given that it was sparked by a debate over bus advertising: “All of us, Christians or otherwise, ought to be wary of the systematic campaign to destroy everything our civilisation stands for.”

Wow. Opening the Mail is always a jarring experience, a bit like being throw headfirst into a deranged version of the 1950s, but propagating hard-core, build-a-nuclear-bunker-under-the-shed conspiracy theories is definitely a new level of crazy.
The Guardian framed the controversy as part of a wider trend towards Christian political activism among ‘aggressively conservative evangelical groups’, citing some wonk who thinks that “the scale of their political power has been in long-term decline and some groups of Christians have reacted with fear and anger. They fear they will become irrelevant and they are angry because they feel they hold the truth and have a right to be at the centre of the arena.’ Because, of course, who does what to whom in the bedroom is the political issue of the moment.

The Telegraph tries to claim that “the ‘bus advert storm’ confirms that Christians are now more progressive than gay rights activists”, playing somewhat weakly on the argument that. perversely, it is now the Christians rather than gay rights activists who see homosexuality as a lifestyle choice rather down to some nefarious ‘gay gene’, as was the conservative belief in the old days. Interesting, though the point might be more convincing if those same Christians didn’t talk about these ‘lifestyle choices’ like some multi-headed beast from the hallucinatory parts of the Bible that no one bothers to try and draw moral lessons from.

The whole firestorm does feel a little forced, though: the British church is known more for fund-raising tea parties than for fire and brimstone about the devilwork of permissive values. I doubt we’ll be hearing much more about voodoo gay cures and saving British civilisation anytime soon.