Sometimes I’d love to be angrier than I am. John Cleese used to do a series of adverts for the Liberal Democrats in which he made a satirical case for anger in politics. Extremism and righteous fury, he opined, were too much maligned – often overlooked is the wonderful benefit of being a raving Trot or a bloodthirsty capitalist: it makes you feel good. You don’t have to entertain doubts, and you can project all the ills of the world onto your enemies, and feel like you’re Luke Skywalker fighting the Evil Empire of socialist tyranny or neoliberal barbarism, delete as applicable. The upshot we were meant to take away, of course, was that the Lib Dems had no interest in feeling good about themselves, but were all about hard decisions and pragmatic problem-solving. 

The events since the inception of the coalition, whose halfway point we have just limped past with all the enthusiasm of a runner whose feet have already fallen off, show all this in a blackly ironic light. Those pragmatic decisions that the Lib Dems said they would be good at making indeed turned out not to make them feel so good, as they promised. It’s no fun being piggy in the middle. This has been proven, indeed, in survey after survey. Severe conservatives and flaming leftwingers report being more happy again and again, despite the fact that most of these groups’ time is apparently taken up with complaining. Similarly, the very religious and the cast-iron atheists are united by their professed contentment, which raises the tantalising prospect that they might someday set aside their differences and find common cause in being unbearably smug to the rest of us.

I’ve wanted to be angry ever since I got to Cambridge. Before I arrived I imagined myself as a heroic student radical, manning the barricades against Tory greed and venality, singing the Internationale defiantly whilst having my head bashed in with a truncheon. I can’t claim I didn’t have the opportunity – it was barely weeks into my time here that the biggest student protests in recent memory kicked off. And when the coaches left, I wasn’t on them. Why not?

In the meantime I had met the leftwingers at Cambridge. And I instantly knew that for all my socialist heart, I wasn’t one of them. I found the CDE attitude to be too self-involved – the infamous poetry-reading protest being the classic example of a movement that has no real interest in reaching the persuadable middle, where the argument is won. And when I realised that I would always be the one trying to think about how to persuade Middle Britain, I knew my socialist dreams were over.

And yet, I still know all the words to the (Billy Bragg version) Internationale. I sing it in the shower. And when it came to watching Les Miserables, which I found passably entertaining throughout, I suddenly found myself weeping not at Anne Hathaway but at the final chorus –the “wretched of the earth” clinging to the barricade in a paradise of eternal revolution. I still want to be passionate and angry and feel good about it. But nothing, no politician and no major political movement going, convinces me to throw away my doubt.

Orwell said of Charles Dickens that underneath his writing you could always sense the face of a “generously angry” man. It is that sense of generosity and love behind the passion, not a mindless hatred of the Other, the Tory or the Trot, that I want to discover. But until then I’ll only throw away my moderate scepticism and embrace feeling good about my beliefs while watching Les Mis – but I’ll be feeling pretty miserable myself the rest of the time.