Jacob Rees-Mogg’s rise to apparent Tory leadership prospect sounds like something his father might have predicted. A celebrated former editor of the Times, Rees-Mogg senior had such an erring gift for futurology that Private Eye nicknamed him Mystic Mogg. He was arguably the first modern journalist who really should have got out of the predictions game, though in this respect he has spawned more heirs than even Jacob (who recently welcomed his sixth child, Sixtus). If only Mystic had lived now, in an era when all the crazy stuff comes true, and the smart money is on the butterfly breaking the wheel.

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Those of us firmly out of the predictions game can merely enjoy the show, and nothing would make me shriek with laughter so much as the Tories doing what Edmund Burke famously termed “losing their shit” and alighting on Rees-Mogg as the man. Actually, hang on – there is something funnier: the fact that he was reported everywhere this week to have “overtaken” Boris Johnson as preferred next leader in polls of Tory members.

I do love that “overtaken”, reminding you that this is all basically some meth-assisted take on The Tortoise and the Hare. Think of it as The Tortoise and the Hair, perhaps, with the tortoise twirling a silver-topped walking cane as he makes his triumphant advance. And we’ll have more on canes very shortly.

Yes, of all the indignities visited upon Boris as he heads towards communing with his party at conference early next month, little could sting him as much as the notion that he has been replaced in the Tory affections by that preposterous squit Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It surely goes against the natural hierarchy of things. Though they were not at school – there is only one school – at the same time, word of Rees-Mogg would certainly have reached Johnson back in the day. Jacob was a sort of urban myth on Eton High Street, down which he liked to proceed clicking his flapping umbrella as though it were a cane. Collectors of arcane school rules may care to know that at School, you weren’t allowed to fasten up your folded umbrella until you had attained a certain level of privilege (privilege in the earlier sense of the word, obviously, not the modern one: everyone at School obviously already had that).

As he made his stately progress among the locals, he would frequently be followed by boggling younger boys, who already regarded his shtick as ludicrously affected. (Honestly, Moggmentum supporters – how self-loathing are you? I can’t think of anything more beaten than rallying behind someone even 13-year-old Etonians could see through in the 1980s.)

It may be fashionable to hail Rees-Mogg’s intellect now, but back then his contributions to the debating society were ironically cheered before they got under way, and consisted of the likes of not caring too much what homosexuals do to each other as long as they didn’t do it to him. One who sat through quite a few of these zingers recalled him wearily as “a posh Karl Pilkington”.

And yet here we are today. Much is written about some Tories’ enduring search for a new Iron Lady to fantasise about. Just after the election was called, a few old-school Tory MPs were precipitously referring to Theresa May as Mummy. They will always have to live with the shame of what we all know they did at least a couple of times before they realised May wasn’t The One.

Yet in the interests of equal opportunities, a whole body of armchair psychosexual analysis should build up around Moggy and Boris. What draws a certain type of Tory to these studied Etonian “eccentrics”? What are they picturing, deep down, in the places they don’t talk about at constituency parties? One to be debated at a Tory conference fringe event, perhaps.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jacob Rees-Mogg at 12. He ‘comes across more as an avid Wodehouse reader’s idea of a Wodehouse gentleman, rather than the genuine article.’ Photograph: Bill Cross/ANL/Rex/Shutterstock

For now, a word on Jacob’s most celebrated quality: authenticity. Is he? Despite starting all this bollocks very early, Moggy still doesn’t quite carry it off. Clive James once wrote of the breathless glamour of Judith Krantz’s bonkbusters: “Mrs Krantz would probably hate to hear it said, but she gives the impression of having been included late amongst the exclusiveness she so admires. There is nothing wrong with gusto, but when easy familiarity is what you are trying to convey, gush is to be avoided.”

And so with Moggy, who would probably hate to hear it said, but who comes across more as an avid Wodehouse reader’s idea of a Wodehouse gentleman, rather than the genuine article (in a 1985 interview with Tatler he declared Wodehouse his favourite author.) The Moggster’s no Tom Ripley or anything, but just as we all mispronounce words if we’ve only read them rather than heard them, so there remains a slight but perceptible inauthenticity to the chap being heralded as the ultimate authentic politician. He is not, shall we say, the true eccentric’s eccentric. Nor the toff’s toff.

In one sense, so what? We should all be what we want to be, and so on, and though the likes of Rees-Mogg never appear especially interested in extending various kinds of mobility to others, perhaps the mere rejection of blandness gives him a pass.

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But in another sense it is all a little bit weird, in this day and age, isn’t it? The consensus – at least, the spoken consensus – is that society would benefit from getting away from the old hierarchies (in which, I should stress, I quite obviously include myself. While that world has furnished me with some of the detail in this column, I do have to hope people like me aren’t the future).

It’s not that Rees-Mogg should pretend to be something he isn’t: it’s that he already is. He’s not just tacking back to things that other people feel should be left behind – he’s going past the point from which he even began. That says something about a person, something with which I am not sure voters would be wise to be comfortable.

Above the political parapet, it would take a singular sort of ruthlessness to pursue a full debunking of his poses. I can’t quite picture Boris as Philip Seymour Hoffman in that scene in The Talented Mr Ripley, smelling a rat with Ripley’s unconvincing attempt at an upper-class interior. But any Conservative leadership contest featuring the two would be riven with the same sort of unspoken rat-smelling: a reminder that too much Tory politics continues to be a game rooted in the innate understandings, internal hierarchies and enduring omertàs of School. Played for rather higher stakes, of course – but not their own.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist