Donald Trump may be assembling the world’s richest government but he remains a few Boris Johnsons short of possessing the most arrogant and privileged one. Such a title surely belongs to the Tory government currently headed by Theresa May but which was begat by David Cameron. The real difference between Trump’s cabinet and May’s is that many of his high office holders have at least earned their fortunes. The UK Tory party, on the other hand, is the natural home of unearned wealth and privilege.

It has always been a curious anomaly of the UK Tories that they preach the virtues of honest and hard graft but in practice will always promote the interests of those at the top of society who rarely work and who will do anything to avoid contributing to the upkeep of the country that allows them to wallow in this lifestyle.

Another Tory anomaly is that while extolling the virtues of the free market and unfettered competition in all other areas, where their writ runs they encourage unfair advantage. They would rather award an important job to a buffoon who was considered the “right sort” than hand it to a competent person who, alas, attended the wrong school.

Underpinning everything that they do at home and abroad is the need to ensure that power is exercised by as small and exclusive a group as possible. The lord alone knows how many military disasters (including many that have been concealed from us) have been the result of an inbred officer class that included many who were given the safe haven of a regiment to stop them creating chaos at home. How many billions of pounds in government cock-ups could have been saved if the higher echelons of the civil service were confined only to the UK’s brightest and best rather than a private members club for the scions of a small group of families who have been running the show since Agincourt?

How many miscarriages of justice have occurred because we allow justice to be dispensed by a gratuitously and grotesquely unrepresentative temple of law lords? I did have a laugh last month at the faux outrage of people who were shocked that our top judges were being openly and savagely criticised over their Brexit verdict last month.

Those gilded few who have ownership of the highest courts in the land are selected from a tiny tributary of society who attended the most exclusive and expensive schools before taking a place at Oxford or Cambridge that had been waiting for them since before they were born. Many of them would have struggled had they not had the benefit of a lopsided playing field. Why should we assume that all their verdicts are safe and that they dispense justice equitably when they are drawn from such a small pool?

The arrogance of the Tories in government rests upon this pattern of privilege and entitlement that has remained more or less intact since Magna Carta. All around this power structure is the thrum of thousands of common people who subjugate their personal dignity and sense of self in the delusion that, one day, they may be beckoned in. They are to be found in some national newspapers and in the high command of the BBC. Many of them have insinuated themselves into the parliamentary Labour party. They are disdained by genuine aristocrats but nevertheless retained and indulged as useful idiots.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brexit secretary David Davis, left, and foreign secretary Boris Johnson. Composite: Gareth Fuller, Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA/AFP/Getty Images

It is why David Davis and Boris Johnson can stravaig around Europe insulting EU heads of state and demanding that they bow to their half-baked demands knowing full well that the ridiculousness of their position will never be properly examined at home.

Almost every senior EU official, foreign minister and premier is united in their post-Brexit message to Britain: you can’t get access to the single market if you don’t allow free movement of our peoples and if you believe otherwise then you are a fool who is misleading your own people.

Theresa May now appears to have grasped that the EU is not for budging, which is why this devout Christian is prepared to use millions of EU citizens resident in the UK as human shields in her negotiations with Europe. In Ms May’s church, they probably skipped over the feeding of the 5,000 lest any vulnerable person misinterpret it as a justification for socialism.

In Scotland, you wonder when the nation will finally have had its fill of the sound of Tories just saying “No!” On Thursday, we witnessed another one, Phillip Hammond, making a rare visit north to Edinburgh to tell the Scottish government that not only would a separate Brexit deal for Scotland not happen but that the SNP were clutching at straws for asking for one. Effectively, he was telling Scotland: “Not only will your aspirations not be represented by the UK government but you don’t even have the right to ask in the first place.” This is from the man who tried to deflect criticism of the banks’ role in the 2008 credit crisis. “They had to lend to someone,” said Hammond, who has an estimated personal wealth of more than £10m.

The same dismissive and sneering attitude was evident less than three years ago when another chancellor, George Osborne, told the Scottish people that they couldn’t use sterling if they dared to vote for independence. This was despite the fact that the pound belonged to Scotland as much as it did to the rest of the UK; that Scottish business taxes, oil and gas had contributed to the wealth of the UK and the traditional purchasing power of sterling. “You don’t even have the right to discuss this with us,” Osborne had effectively said.

Like Osborne and Cameron and Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown, Hammond had used membership of the EU as one of several bribes offered in exchange for a No vote in the independence referendum. “Tough luck, suckers,” he is now effectively saying. “Now keep your mouths shut and let us do all the talking.”