Poor old David Cameron, returning from pointing at fish on his Cornish holiday – to be greeted with a media warning him of “double trouble”. Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage declaring their parliamentary candidacies could hardly have been more predictable, but both bring the Tory leader’s plight into sharp relief. Despite a much-vaunted “economic recovery” that is utterly meaningless in the lives of most Britons, Labour retains a consistent lead, thanks to the ex-Lib Dems who fled Nick Clegg’s fold in disgust. Cameron failed to redraw the electoral boundaries in his favour; his quest to defy history and increase the Tory share of the vote looks all but hopeless. Farage’s purple army are chewing into the Conservative base, and the Ukip surge has not evaporated as expected after the European elections. And so Johnson circles like a vulture, waiting for the Cameron project to become a carcass so he can swoop in and feast.

But – seriously – what a depressing spectacle, and what an indictment of British democracy. Both Farage and Johnson are portrayed as the ultimate mavericks, the politicians who dare to deviate from the script and – in the case of Ukip’s leader – as an anti-establishment insurgent. Let’s just park their shared backgrounds (over which they have no control) as public school educated white men. These great “mavericks” share the same basic underlying assumptions as much of the rest of the political and media elite. Both want to privatise public assets and hand them over to profiteers: including, say, the NHS, with Ukip having called for privatisation exceeding even the current government’s plans. Both want to slash taxes on the rich: both call for the top rate of tax to be lowered to 40%. Both champion the City, where Farage used to work as a commodities broker. Both want to curtail the remaining rights British workers still have: in Johnson’s case, to subject trade unions to a turnout threshold which, if applied to the London mayoralty, would render his 2012 election illegitimate. Both encourage popular anger to be directed anywhere but at the wealthy few who actually run the show: notably, immigrants. Both are the establishment in human form, the fighters for the interests of the richest people in Britain who have doubled their wealth in just five years.

London mayor Boris Johnson. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

The audacity of both is striking, even as it is facilitated by the mainstream media. Johnson (or “Boris”, as we are encouraged to chummily call him) is a fantastic branding exercise for hard-nosed, old-fashioned defend-the-rich Toryism. Any other politician snapped flapping around on a zipwire would be crucified – think bacon sandwich gate by a factor of a thousand – but for Johnson, it’s a triumph! His wacky turn of phrase (being reincarnated as an olive – LOL!), his bumbling demeanour – all foster the image of an outsider, the only politician who passes the “want to have a pint with and not simply to pour it all over his head” test. And yet here is the man who launches crusades to stop the “vilification” of bankers, as though it is the financial elite who plunged Britain into economic calamity who are routinely demonised, rather than unemployed people, immigrants, trade unions and public sector workers.

Farage is arguably even more masterful. Ukip is a party led by uber-neoliberals, and yet its voters are – on economic issues – generally strongly left-of-centre. That is all down to Ukip’s skilful manipulation of the idea that immigrants – rather than, say, bankers, tax-dodgers or poverty-paying bosses – are responsible for the nation’s ills. In doing so, Farage presents himself as the man who will stick it to the establishment, when in fact he is one of its greatest shields.

And so Farage and Johnson say all too much about the state of British democracy. The confines of acceptable political opinion are narrow and zealously guarded, and those presented as outsiders are actually the establishment in undiluted form. It must surely be a source of great private amusement for both.