SO here comes the latest Egyptian joke about 82-year-old President Hosni Mubarak. The president, a keen squash player – how else could he keep his jet-black hair? – calls up the Sheikh of Al Azhar to ask if there are squash courts in heaven.

The sheikh asks for a couple of days. Two days later, he calls Mr Mubarak back. “There's good news and bad news,” he says. Give me the good news, snaps Mr Mubarak. “Well,” says the sheikh, “there are lots of squash courts in heaven.” And the bad news, asks the president? “You have a match there in two weeks' time!”

The fact that the intelligence services ignore the usual suspects when this sort of joke is made does not signify a new freedom of speech or – dare one say it – a new democracy in Egypt. The truth is that the president, in poor health since a gall bladder operation in Germany, is a very old man who has no appointed successor and whose imminent demise is the only story in town, told with that familiar vein of cruel humour in which Egyptians are rivalled only by the Lebanese. The days when Mr Mubarak was called “La vache qui rit” (the cow who smiles) – the Egyptians know the joke in its French form – are gone.

A lot of them want him dead – not out of personal animosity, but because they want political change. They probably will not get it. Telling Egyptians that “only God knows” who the next president will be – Mr Mubarak actually said this – is ridiculous. Will it be his son, Gamal? The head of Egyptian intelligence, Omar Sulieman? He's probably had too many heart problems.

But either way, it would change nothing. Of Mohamed ElBaradei, more later. The opposition “Kifaya” – “Enough” – party is regularly attacked by the security services. Perhaps Mr Mubarak does not care.

Cairo has been labouring under an intense heat wave these past two weeks – when the local papers report it on page one, you know it's serious – and in the foetid slums of Beaulac al-Daqrour, sweating through 47 degrees, the millions of Egyptians who live under Mr Mubarak's exhausted rule have little time for politics.

Like the Iraqis under UN sanctions, whom the West always hoped would overthrow Saddam, most Egyptians are too weary to rise up against the regime, more anxious to protect their families from poverty than to abuse the man who leaves them in such misery. Even the open sewers of al-Daqruor have dried up, leaving a black stream at the bottom, in which barefoot children play.

Just as Victorian governments always feared revolution amid the slums of London, Manchester and Liverpool, so the Egyptian authorities have layered the slums with a carapace of competing intelligence services to ensure that no serious political opposition can be sustained amid the piety and filth of Cairo.

A splurge of posters carrying a photograph of Mr Mubarak's 47-year old businessman son, Gamal, below the bleak caption “Gamal ... Egypt” – a sad gesture to Egypt's 28 per cent illiteracy rate rather than a chic slogan by his National Democratic Party – has been disowned by his supporters, who now oddly include a member of the opposition leftist Tagammu party, Magdy el-Kurdi.

True to the methods of all good Arab socialist movements, poor Mr el-Kurdi is to be “interrogated” for violating the Tagammu's principles. “...We don't support individuals,” the party's co-founder said. “Rather, we seek democracy.”

And so say all of us. The problem with Mr Mubarak's presidency – and with Gamal, if this is to become the second caliphate in the Middle East (the capital of the first being Damascus) – is that after decades of promised improvements, most Egyptians still feel that their country has no physical or political movement. The country's state of emergency curbs their tongues. Poverty breaks down their energy. They have been injected with political boredom.

The rich live in gated communities outside the city; indeed, all the major hotels in Cairo have become gated communities for foreigners, tourists and businessmen and women, who breathe air-conditioning, sip cold beers beside the pool, sweep to their appointments in luxury buses or limousines. For the rich, there are tennis clubs, horse-riding, boutiques, concert performances. For the poor, there is controlled religion, Dickensian housing and television soap opera. No wonder Egyptian television is celebrating its 50th anniversary with the slogan: “We started big, and we remain big.” Big – as in fat.

For, as a Cairo freelance writer, Nael Shama, noted last month, Egyptian television's Nile News, launched in English and French in 1994 as a rival to CNN, is a flop.

“Because Nile News has ... been owned and run by the Egyptian state, its freedom of expression has always been curtailed ... As in all dictatorships, news reports must start with highlighting the inane announcements of the president followed by the 'less important' world news, be it the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York, or the start of a new war in the Middle East ...”

Demonstrations and strikes – trade unions have grasped back a little power in recent months – are rarely reported. The Muslim Brotherhood, the theoretically banned but tolerated opposition party, is forbidden from all Nile News programmes.

That's the way Egypt is run. There is a kind of facade of toleration. It's like riding on a familiar old train, puffing round the Cairo loop-line to Giza. You already know the names of the stations by heart. Call Egypt a dictatorship and the government will tell you that democracy takes time – at least 29 years under Mr Mubarak and counting – and ask why the Brotherhood can campaign at elections if the country is so undemocratic. Forget for a moment that an awful lot of the Brotherhood are regularly banged up, and you will also be told of the freedom of the press. Forget for a moment that journalists are regularly banged up, and you will be told that even the president enjoys the jokes told against him.

“If this was a Saddam-style dictatorship,” an old friend and Mubarak loyalist asked me, “do you think we'd have the internet so freely available to our youth?”

But there you have to signal red and stop the train. For, two months ago, a 28-year old human rights activist called Khaled Said was dragged out of an Alexandria internet cafe by two cops, Awad Sulieman and Mahmoud Salah Mahmoud – the names are important because Egyptian policemen are usually allowed anonymity – who, in a vicious assault, smashed his head against a wall and killed him. The reason for his murder, his mother suspects, is that Mr Said possessed a videotape of some cops sharing out drugs seized during a police raid.

Even before the autopsy, however, the Egyptian interior ministry said that Mr Said had criminal convictions, evaded national service and had swallowed a packet of marijuana when he saw the police arrive. The initial autopsy claimed that Mr Said died by asphyxiating on this plastic wrap of drugs, a conclusion disputed by international forensic pathologists, who said that photographs of the autopsy were “disturbingly amateurish”, and questioned the lesions on Mr Said's corpse.

The pathologists said they were consistent with a beating during arrest rather than the rather extraordinary police claim that their prisoner had “fallen from a stretcher while being taken to an ambulance”. Why would he fall from a stretcher?

In any event, when the case came to court last month, it turned out that the cops were charged only with “misuse of force”, which carried a sentence of one year's imprisonment. —Dawn-Independent News Service © The Independent

In court, lawyers for the Said family demanded the charges should be changed to murder. Yet, in a society where police brutality is regarded as routine – a policeman sentenced for torturing a prisoner returned to the force after a brief period of imprisonment – no one has high hopes that justice will be done.