TORY MP and potential leadership candidate Jacob Rees-Mogg, who bears a startlingly uncanny resemblance to posh Cuthbert from the Bash Street Kids comic strip, has yet again been demonstrating that his cartoon double is a more three-dimensional character than he is.

You would almost think that Rees-Mogg had consciously based his entire persona on that of Cuthbert, if it wasn’t for the fact that we can be sure that he’s never read the Bash Street Kids, on account of the fact that the Beano was never published in Latin. Latin for Bash Street Kids is Gnati Viae Oppugnand, in case he was wondering. This week, Rees-Mogg decided to speak down to us from the lofty heights of his 18th-century affectations to say that the rise in the usage of food banks in the UK is a great thing. It’s all “rather uplifting”, he said during an interview on LBC radio, or rather, the LBC wireless telegraphy, as he doubtless prefers to call it.

According to those who run food banks, the rise in usage over recent years is due to the increasing number of people who are sanctioned as a result of the repressive changes made to the social security system by the Conservatives, and the rising number of people in low-paid employment who are unable to make ends meet.

Earlier this year, the largest provider of food banks, the Trussell Trust, reported record numbers of people approaching it for help, and firmly blamed the rise on the chaotic introduction of Universal Credit and the six-week delay in receiving benefits. The report from the Trussell Trust demanded that the government scrap the minimum six-week wait for payment of Universal Credit, which is causing debt and leading vulnerable people to seek short term loans at excessive rates of interest. The trust reported that some of its clients had lost their homes as a result, adding to the numbers of homeless people, numbers which have soared under the Conservatives.

For a Tory to call the rise in food bank usage “uplifting” is a bit like Dracula being pleased by the spread of blood banks. The fact that increasing numbers of people in one of the richest countries in the world are having to seek out a charity in order to have enough to eat isn’t uplifting, it’s shameful.

Rees-Mogg affects many things, like the entire 18th-century gentleman schtick that even his school-mates at Eton were able to recognise as an attention seeking act.

He’s praised by his supporters for his honesty and his authenticity, which apparently means that as long as you cover your cruelty and lack of compassion behind a veneer of self-conscious Latin tags, you’re suddenly a man of the people.

BUT with Rees-Mogg it’s all pose. He thinks Bertie Wooster is a style guide. There’s no real difference between him and someone who goes to a sci-fi convention dressed as a Klingon except that the Klingon isn’t trying to persuade anyone that they really are from another planet.

Mind you, Rees-Mogg isn’t trying to persuade us that he’s from another planet, even though he really is. He’s opposed to abortion in all circumstances, even rape and incest. He only cares about fertilised eggs, not real human beings. This is because once you develop a central nervous system even a foetus can see how ridiculous he is.

This is a man who’s being touted by many Conservative activists as a serious prospect for party leader, once the walking wounded Theresa May has been deposed. There’s a certain type of Tory who is attracted to a posh boy. Saying nasty and unacceptable things in a cut-glass accent apparently makes the unacceptable more acceptable. To be bereft of compassion, care and humanity, but to deliver it in Etonian vowels, seemingly makes it plain speaking. But cruelty is still cruelty, however you dress it up.

To affect to find it uplifting because other people are trying to remedy the wrongs that you and your own political party are responsible for creating takes moral bankruptcy to a whole new level.

It means that you’re no better than a thug who is happy to mug the poor and the vulnerable and deprive them of a dignified living and then have the hypocrisy to claim that it’s a wonderful thing that other people are trying to right the evils that you have done. You’re trying to claim that the fact that other people are trying to repair the damage that you’ve done means it’s fine for you to do damage.

You may be a very polite thug, an impeccably tailored thug, a thug with good manners who knows how to say please and thank you. But you’re still a thug who’s excusing thuggish behaviour.

The United Kingdom has become nasty place where to be poor means to be punished and blamed for your poverty, and the Conservatives are the party of a thugocracy that celebrates casual cruelty. No amount of expensive tailoring and an even more expensive education can mask the rotting smell of a party that’s corrupting the soul of Britain.