How the MPs’ expenses scandal proved the wisdom of Alain de Botton

Whenever I’m tempted to pretend to be nicer so that fewer people hate me, I remember my old friend Alain de Botton. Alain is a genuinely delightful fellow — charming, considerate, wise, modest — but this has made no difference to the degree with which, in some quarters, he remains intensely loathed.

This saddens me. There are certainly occasions when I find his utopianism naive, twee, mockable. And, yes, I suppose it’s easy to be jealous of a handsome man with a beautiful wife and a comfortable life which seems to involve nothing harder than pondering philosophically, writing bestsellers and being on TV a lot. But for all his faults, I genuinely believe that de Botton is the Montaigne of our age and that those who dismiss him as glib or patronising or sententious aren’t nearly as sophisticated as they think.

Take his new book The News: A User’s Manual which, as one savage review noticed, has been ‘beautifully produced by his publisher to look like a prayer book, misleadingly making you think it must be something to treasure’. But surely what is so annoying about de Botton is also what makes him so brilliant: yes, he is a well-heeled egghead with the leisure to ponder different aspects of life — love, work, travel, architecture, religion — and boil them down to trite-seeming verities. But a) no one else is doing this stuff because none of us has the time and b) the perspective de Botton offers is so utterly different from what you find elsewhere that to read him is to see the world delightfully anew.

Here is a passage I like: ‘The news routinely tantalises us with the promise of drastic change and improvement. It anoints certain politicians as visionaries and expresses confidence that they can fundamentally transform the nation with a few months of attaining office.