Jacob Rees-Mogg’s suggestion that those who perished in Grenfell Tower lacked “common sense” was not a gaffe, as one BBC journalist declared. As Maya Angelou put it: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” Here was a confession, an insight into a worldview steeped in a sense of class privilege and social superiority. We don’t need to read between the lines: the Tory MP Andrew Bridgen has done it for us. When the BBC’s Evan Davis put it to him that Rees-Mogg was effectively saying: “I wouldn’t have died because I would have been cleverer than the people who took the fire brigade’s advice,” Bridgen did not demur, adding – after a sigh-filled pause – “But we want very clever people running the country, don’t we, Evan? … That’s a byproduct of what Jacob is, that’s why he is in a position of authority.”

Thatcher is frequently portrayed as a challenge to the old Tory toffs, but her snobbery was no less great

Leave aside that the Grenfell disaster itself was an indictment of a rotten social order that values money over people’s lives. Here, in the minds of Rees-Mogg and Bridgen, is a world in which the masses are feeble, ignorant, simple-minded, requiring leadership by their supposed social betters who are, quite literally, born to rule. If Rees-Mogg is indeed “very clever”, it needs more proof than pretentious smatterings of Latin phrases recalled from Eton, and there it is lacking. Accusations of “class warfare” have always been a staple Tory attack line, normally when confronted with calls to more equitably tax wealth and income. But to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, one side preaches the class war while the other vigorously fights it. While other Tories may choose their words more carefully, the attitude underpinning Rees-Mogg’s and Bridgen’s words are a feature, not a bug, of their party. Without a sense of social superiority, there would be no Toryism.

Indeed, Tories have often been as candid as Rees-Mogg is himself. Labour’s birth as a mass political force had much to do with an infamous court ruling. The Taff Vale legal judgment of 1901 made trade unions liable for profits lost in strikes, effectively rendering industrial action impossible and underlining the need for unions to have parliamentary representation. The future Tory prime minister Stanley Baldwin later admitted: “The Conservatives can’t talk of class war. They started it.” When Britain’s last general strike, in 1926, ended in defeat for the trade union movement, the former Tory prime minister Arthur Balfour sneered: “The general strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.”

Back in the 1970s, Margaret Thatcher’s right-hand man Keith Joseph – a pioneer of market fundamentalism who was later dubbed “the Mad Monk” – ruined his Tory leadership chances by making the mistake of saying what he truly thought. He argued that more and more children “are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5 … Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment.” His final line – “The balance of our population, our human stock is threatened” – outed his eugenicist bigotry in its all its ugliness: that the ill-educated poor would out-breed their social superiors.

‘We don’t need to read between the lines: the Tory MP Andrew Bridgen has done it for us.’ Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Barcroft Media

As the daughter of a shopkeeper, Margaret Thatcher herself is frequently portrayed as a challenge to the old Tory toffs, but her snobbery was no less great. As one shadow cabinet minister told the Guardian’s Hugo Young on the eve of her 1979 electoral triumph: “She is still basically a Finchley lady. Her view of the world is distressingly narrow. She regards the working class as idle, deceitful, inferior and bloody-minded.” Even supposed liberal Tories such as Michael Heseltine believed in the rule of those with privilege over those who did not, even if they believed that rule should be benevolent. He believed in “good enlightened capitalism – paternalism if you like,” as he once put it. “Noblesse oblige. I believe strongly that those with power and privilege have responsibilities.”

Fear of, and contempt towards, working-class people is an unbroken thread in Tory history. Take the revelation by Nick Clegg that the Tory leadership once told him: “I don’t understand why you keep going on about the need for more social housing – it just creates Labour voters.” Indeed, it reflected a traditional Tory aim: that a sense of solidarity – that the majority should use their collective power to force concessions from the powerful – was innately subversive, and needed to be replaced by an everyone-for-themselves individualism. “It’s not the existence of classes that threatens the unity of the nation,” as one official Conservative party document put it in 1976, “but the existence of class feeling.” In other words, even to discuss social class meant asking searching questions about why some have wealth and power that go beyond believing that those at the top somehow deserved to be there.

It is this worldview that underpins so many policy assumptions. Taxes should be slashed for the rich, because they amassed their wealth through their superior talents and hard efforts. The welfare state should be rolled back, because it merely incentivises the fecklessness and aversion to work that exists among the poor. It is even the rationale used to argue that buildings burn and kill dozens of predominantly working-class people not because flammable cladding was chosen because it was cheaper, or because fire sprinklers weren’t in place because that costs money, but because the victims lacked common sense or leadership skills.

It is this sense of class chauvinism that led, in part, to Grenfell – because who truly thinks that if the tower was full of luxury apartments filled with City slickers and hedge-fund managers that this would have ever happened? So, let’s not dismiss Rees-Mogg’s utterances as gaffes. This is how they see the world: it is the very foundation of their politics. As the Tories pin their election hopes on working-class communities in the North and Midlands, this eternal truth needs to be remembered.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist