Where once Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson were the sultans of spin, David Cameron and George Osborne have now seized their crowns. At the Conservative conference in Manchester – a city that boasts not a single Tory MP or councillor – the prime minister and chancellor spun themselves into the political stratosphere.

This is a world of positioning and posturing unbound. Liberated from the Liberal Democrats, the Tories have reinvented themselves as “progressives” and champions of “working people”, crusaders for “social justice” against the “scourge of poverty”. In their most surreal flights of fancy, they even boast of being what until last month no Labour leader for a generation would have dreamed of claiming to be: the “workers’ party”. Their media retinue are dazzled by the cleverness of it all. Imagine, posing as your opponents, who could have ever imagined such a thing?

This, it is said, is the ultimate pitch for the elixir of politics, the “centre ground” (or “common ground”, when Cameron is trying to appease his restive right wing) – from which the triumphant Tories will command all they survey, and drive Jeremy Corbyn and his Labour insurgency to the outer fringes of the known political world.

This is the playbook pioneered by Tony Blair, whom Cameron and Osborne revere

Put on one side for a moment where this fabled centre ground is in fact to be found. In media and political class orthodoxy, it’s located somewhere between the main parties, anchored in an elite conception of regulated capitalism and social liberalism. If it were judged by the mid-point of public opinion, on the other hand, it would include support for public ownership and high taxes on the rich, as well as tougher immigration controls.

But wherever you choose to locate this centrist territory, Cameron’s Tories are clearly not colonising it. What they are colonising is centrist, or even traditionally centre-left, rhetoric. Osborne was quite frank about it this week. In 2012, after he was booed at the Olympic stadium, he made a “conscious effort to get out and communicate”. So now he talks about “governing for the many” and looking after “working people” with the best of them.

This is the playbook pioneered by Tony Blair, whom Cameron and Osborne revere. The difference is that when Blair and Gordon Brown promised light-touch regulation and low taxes on the rich, they meant it, and stuck to it. But when Cameron and Osborne wax lyrical about protecting working people, it’s strictly for the cameras.

When it comes to hard policy, that couldn’t be clearer. Instead of property developers having to deliver social housing for rent, Cameron revealed on Wednesday, they will now be able to build new “starter homes” to sell, out of the reach of those on average earnings in most of the country.

If prisons aren’t working, sell them off, the prime minister declared. As for Osborne’s “devolution revolution”, his abolition of the uniform business rate will only give councils the right to cut taxes. A few will be able to make capped increases, but only if they are signed off by private businesses. In other words, after five years of deep cuts, local authorities will be forced into a dutch auction in taxes to attract investment, while withdrawal of grants will widen the gap between richer and poorer areas – and north and south.

And for all his talk of a northern economic powerhouse, even Osborne conceded in Manchester that he didn’t know “if it will work”. The only other concrete expression of the supposed Tory pitch to the centre is the plan to increase the minimum wage to £9 an hour by 2020 for over 25-year-olds.

But since the only aim of the rise is to allow a far more savage cut in tax credits that will leave 3 million low-paid working families £1,300 a year worse off, while corporation and inheritance taxes have been slashed for the wealthiest, it hardly qualifies as any sort of shift to the political centre.

On the contrary. A Conservative party funded by bankers and hedge funds that now claims to represent working people is preparing to drive down the incomes of supermarket workers and cleaners, deepening inequality in the process, while its multimillionaire health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, insists that losing the cash from the public purse will give them “dignity and self-respect”.

Add to that the trade union bill now going through parliament, which will not only effectively outlaw most strikes but will strip Labour of the majority of its trade union funding, and the authoritarian, anti-worker inspiration of the Cameron-Osborne administration can’t be seriously doubted.

“You head back to the 1980s”, the chancellor told Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party on Monday. But that is exactly what his own government is doing. Cutting public services and benefits, passing anti-union laws, selling off social housing and overseeing vast privatisations: it’s like an action replay of the Thatcher years.

If you look at what they’re doing, rather than what they’re saying, the Tories aren’t occupying the centre at all, however defined. They’re clearly moving to the right. The fact that they feel it necessary to give that a sort of social-democratic veneer reflects a recognition that their own social base is fragile. Cameron won the election, after all, with the votes of less than a quarter of the electorate.

It also helps to explains the extremism of the prime minister’s attack on Corbyn as a “Britain-hating terrorist sympathiser”. The Tories are determined to fix a grotesque caricature of the Labour leader in the public mind in case what he stands for starts to resonate more widely – a danger recognised in debates on the Conservative conference fringe.

But their real problem is that rhetoric won’t cut through unless it’s reflected in people’s experience. Polling shows the public already regards Cameron as having moved further to the right since the summer. As the next phase of cuts in services, benefits and tax credits bite in spring, affordable housing becomes further out of reach, economic recovery continues to falter and Conservative divisions on Europe erupt, no amount of “progressive working people” posturing will mask reality. The Tories have reached the outer limits of spin.