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Washington Observers of American politics would do well to learn how to pronounce the name of a former Republican lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. The first syllable should be enunciated not, as is common, like the stomach muscle, but rather like the nickname of the 16th American president, Honest Abe. Of course, Abramoff was dishonest. And this has landed him — and the party of Lincoln — in a lot of trouble. In early January, in a Washington DC courtroom, Abramoff pleaded guilty to charges of tax evasion, mail fraud and conspiracy. Looking like Al Capone in a black fedora and matching trenchcoat as he left the courthouse, Abramoff travelled to Miami the next day, where he pleaded guilty to wire fraud and conspiracy (again).

Faced with the spectacle of the cruelties perpetrated in the name of faith, Voltaire famously cried ‘Ecrasez l’infâme!’ Scores of enlightened thinkers have followed him, declaring organised religion to be the enemy of mankind, the force that divides the believer from the infidel and thereby both excites and authorises murder. Richard Dawkins, whose TV series The Root of all Evil? concludes next Monday, is the most influential living example of this tradition. And he has embellished it with a striking theory of his own — the theory of the religious ‘meme’. A meme is a mental entity that colonises the brains of people, much as a virus colonises a cell.

It is a long, long, time since the Conservative party had the support of a clever, truculent lesbian. In fact, has it ever happened before? Clever, truculent lesbians are usually very left-wing, in my experience. But now one of them has come out, so to speak, for David Cameron — the extremely talented writer Jeanette Winterson. He must be bowled over. I mean, inclusive or what? It’s a long time since British writers were allowed to be Conservative, never mind clever, truculent lesbian British writers. The question, I suppose, is whether the truculent lesbian community has swung decisively to the Right or the Conservative party has made itself more amenable to truculent lesbians.

‘Say seebong-seebong, say seebong-seebong,’ sang the Filipino band in their white tuxedos, swaying cheerfully from side to side. ‘Si bon, si bon,’ whispered Sweetie to the music, smiling carefully, swaying her sumptuous jade earrings in time to the Filipinos’ narrow hips and tapping her manicured nails on the tablecloth; everyone said that before she had left her last husband, who was with the Banque de L’Indochine, she had made him pay for a face lift and a bottom lift. ‘Si bon, si bon,’ she half-sang again, looking archly at her guests round the table; she was giving a birthday party for her new husband, a Scottish investment banker.

Of all the insights that Friedrich August von Hayek bequeathed to us, one in particular shines out today. It is that running through the ideological and political divisions of human history are two distinct and different ways of looking at the world. One Hayek called constructivist rationalism; the other evolutionary rationalism. Hayek spent a lifetime arguing that constructivist rationalism is economically and philosophically flawed because it assumes that ‘all social institutions are, or ought to be, the product of deliberate design’. He later called this The Fatal Conceit. Those who follow this route believe they have it within their power to build, organise and mould society so that it conforms to their concept of what is just and efficient.