The foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, on a visit to Singapore to learn how such a relatively isolated city state has become so successful is only the latest, but most explicit, of a long line of Tory ministers to extol it as the model for the UK post-Brexit.

Quite how Singapore, an authoritarian state capitalist economy akin to China, has become the pre-eminent Tory model for the UK post-Brexit, as opposed to other more democratic economies, is puzzling.

Margaret Thatcher was a great admirer of the former British colony, but more recently others who have been intrigued by Singapore’s success include Sajid Javid, the home secretary, Michael Gove as education secretary in 2012 and Owen Paterson, a luminary of the Tory Eurosceptic benches. Others, such as Sir James Dyson, the Brexiter businessman, speak with their wallet. He picked Singapore and not the UK post-Brexit to build his new electric vehicle. Javid at least speaks from experience – he earned £3m a year as head of Deutsche Bank’s Singapore trading division.

Hunt, quickly refashioning his modernising politics to suit an imminent date with a Tory party electorate, is a more surprising advocate for Singapore. He used an article in the Mail on Sunday before his visit on Wednesday to hail its remarkable transformation from a tiny territory devoid of natural resources into the world’s eighth-richest country, adding it was “a reminder of the tidal shifts that can exist within the ebb and flow of the changing world order”.

In taking this course, Hunt is taking a political risk both for himself and for Brexit. He risks burning his remaining bridges with the small modernising base in the Tory party, but he also risks associating Brexit at such a sensitive time with an economic and democratic model that may be anathema to wavering Brexit voters.

Brexit critics often claim the Tory party vision is for a deregulated Singapore-on-Thames, and here is a senior cabinet minister only weeks before the key Brexit vote travelling 6,700 miles to confirm this to be the case.

For EU negotiators, anxious that a bargain-basement Britain does not have privileged access to its single market, the warning could not be clearer.

At one level, the parallels with the birth of Singapore and post-Brexit Britain are worth drawing. Singapore was expelled in 1965 from its short-lived union with its larger Malaysian neighbours, something that proved to be a blessing in disguise for a small city state few thought could prosper alone.

At the time of independence, Singapore’s GDP per capita stood at just $512. Now it has the eighth-largest GDP per capita in the world and is consistently ranked among the tiger countries, with the highest density of millionaires relative to population. Its achievements in schooling and housing are striking.

“We had to create a new kind of economy, try new methods and schemes never tried before anywhere else in the world, because there was no other country like Singapore,” wrote Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founder in his memoirs, From Third World to First.

But here the potential parallels between two nations reborn become more difficult. Lee explicitly refused to cede any ground to democracy while Singapore’s fellow Asian tiger economies were democratising.

Beginning in 1963, political rival the Socialist Front – a left-wing split from the ruling People’s Action party (PAP) – suffered mass arrests through the use of the Internal Security Act. Subsequent parliamentary elections have not exactly been cliff-hangers. Thanks to a mixture of bans, libel laws and media repression, the PAP manages to win all but three or four of the 80-plus seats up for contest.

Singapore had indeed modernised and developed economically, yet its authoritarian rule went unchallenged. As Milton Friedman, the great free-market economist observed in the 1990s, as much of the world succumbed to democratic rule, Singapore demonstrated that “it is possible to combine a free private market economic system with a dictatorial political system”.

Independent trade unions were so weakened that by the 1970s strikes and work stoppages had disappeared. Wages have been kept low through the use of state-sponsored trade unions and the widespread use of cheap migrant labour, something that Brexit is designed to halt. Income inequality has also widened, even if on most measures it is wider in the US.

Throughout his life, Lee defended this trade-off of democratic rights for growth, insisting that the former would have precluded the latter. “We decide what is right, no matter what the people think.”

Asked on BBC Radio 4 how Singapore fitted into his “invisible chain of democracies” Hunt simply changed the subject. In a speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore, he resorted to euphemism: “The British legacy of the rule of law, clean administration, independent courts and the English language have all been part of Singapore’s success.”

It is also not clear if Singapore’s transformation into an export-orientated manufacturing base for international capital is relevant to the modern UK. Singapore grew at a time when globalisation allowed multinational corporations to take advantage of different labour and production costs in manufacturing. There is little chance, for instance, of the UK becoming a major exporter of electronic goods based on low wages.

Singapore also grew through a form of state intervention more associated with the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, than pro-Brexit economist Patrick Minford. Large infrastructure projects were financed from a fund based on state-compelled savings. State enterprise and public investment were at the heart of the growth. Housing is largely publicly owned.

Significantly, one of the observers most sceptical about the parallels between Singapore and Brexit is Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. In an interview with Bloomberg in November he said: “The Singapore government accounts for 16% of GDP, maybe 17%. So to say that you’re going to be like Singapore, are you going to give up two-thirds of your government spending, state pensions and national health?”

Hunt would presumably answer in the negative, inviting the wider question as to what cause he is advancing by his visit.