Is the Conservative MP Peter Bone secretly in the pay of Nick Clegg? Does he take Lib Dem gold? It is true that no Tory backbencher has been more hostile to coalition than the MP for Wellingborough. And none can compete with him when it comes to being rude about the deputy prime minister, often to his face. But you could take that as further grounds to suspect that he might be a yellow agent. Being nasty about Mr Clegg is how you would maintain your cover if you were a covert operative implanted in the Tory parliamentary party with a brief to cause maximum mischief for David Cameron to the benefit of the Lib Dems.

I'm prompted to wonder about Mr Bone because he is one of the leaders of a gang of Tory MPs who have just mocked the prime minister by launching an "alternative Queen's speech" which, they say, would transform the electoral fortunes of the Conservative party. Many of their 42 proposed bills are from the traditional menu of the right of the Tory party: the restoration of national service, exit from the European Union, the privatisation of the BBC and the reintroduction of the death penalty. They missed a trick, I thought, by not also calling for the resumption of birching in schools, the decriminalisation of duelling and bear-baiting and the relaxation of prohibitions against child chimney sweeps. They throw in a few suggestions that command very widespread support within their party, such as tax breaks to reward marriage, though presumably not gay marriage since another bill calls for a referendum to abolish it.

There are even some quite sensible ideas in the mix, such as putting a cap on the size of the House of Lords. But the eye is most drawn, which was surely their intention, to their most provocatively look-at-me suggestions, which include a bill to ban the burqa in public places and another to rename the late August bank holiday as "Margaret Thatcher Day".

According to Mr Bone: "This is a serious attempt to deliver policies that the British public really want. There are ideas here that could form the basis of a future Conservative manifesto."

What japes! Your first instinct may be to laugh at this as a harmless frolic by some eccentric attention-seekers inhabiting the fruitcake-flavoured fringes of the Tory party. That is how David Cameron's people would like you to react. They dismiss it with a snort and a shrug.

The truth is, though, that this sort of self-indulgent troublemaking among Conservative MPs drives Downing Street to despair. The Tory whips are also said to be angry, but seem powerless to do anything about it. The annoyance it causes is aggravated because Number 10 had been waxing optimistic that the mood of its backbenchers had become a little calmer, a little saner and a little bit more disciplined in recent weeks. The self-immolating frenzy over a EU referendum that saw a record rebellion against the government was receding into the past. So was all the turbulence around gay marriage. The prime minister's people talked hopefully about "clearing the battlefield".

Mr Cameron has been putting a lot of time in with his MPs to try to build bridges with the backbenchers. He has also been making gestures of reconciliation to the right, such as throwing a knighthood to Edward Leigh and allowing the spread of speculation that there will be a return to cabinet rank for Liam Fox in the next reshuffle. The signs of revival in the economy have also engendered optimism at the top of the party that Tory MPs will become more focused on the next general election and more hopeful about winning it.

The Bone-head manifesto illustrates that a significant element remain as unreconciled as ever to their leader, as determined as ever to undermine him and heedless of the potential damage they inflict on their party. The Bone-heads got a particularly warm reception from the Lib Dems who have been gleefully publicising the loopiest and most extreme ideas as examples of what a Tory majority government would get up to unconstrained by the moderating presence of the Lib Dems.

The authors of the "alternative Queen's speech" are not actually representative of the Conservative party. But then the Militant Tendency did not have to be representative of the whole of the Labour party in the 1980s to do it great damage. And the Bone-heads are not wholly unrepresentative of their party either. Banning burqas, bringing back the rope and Thatcher Day would find much support among Tory activists. These MPs must know that presenting a rival Queen's speech to the government's official programme is a disruptive and divisive act, but they just don't care. They must anticipate how this will be used by opponents, but they don't care about that either. They are in love with their capacity to cause mayhem. To ensure that their prospectus made it on to the parliamentary timetable, members of the group had to stage a four-day squat in a room in the Public Bill Office, a hot, square, rather airless box right under Big Ben.

In order to keep their place in the queue, one of their number, the MP for Kettering, Philip Holobone – there seem to be rather too many men called bone in this story – spent four nights on a camp bed. The MP for Bury North, David Nuttall – I guess such a tale just had to involve an MP called Nut – also took a turn.

The dedication of these unreconstructed rightwingers comes from intense passion. They hate coalition. They despise David Cameron. They don't even seem to like being in office. They behave as if they don't want to win the next election and would certainly rather be in opposition after 2015 than in another power-share with the Lib Dems. These irreconcilables are the most vivid manifestation of a malady that has a grip on quite a lot of the Conservative party. Rafael Behr of the New Statesman has a witty coinage for their pathology. He calls it "defeatophilia": a sadomasochistic impulse to want to lose so that they can ditch David Cameron, conduct an ideological purge and be born anew as a party of the purist right.

One can make the obvious point to these people that the Conservative party tried running on pretty rightwing manifestos in 2001 and 2005 and it didn't work out well for them either time. Except that they do not regard the campaigns run by William Hague and Michael Howard as right wing at all. Just as the hard left in the 1980s blamed their party's serial defeats on its failure to offer "real socialism", these Tory Bennites truly believe that the fundamental problem with their party is that it has never been right wing enough. They have been given space to cause grief for Mr Cameron in part because he has too often indulged them. They are also playing into a wider debate, which reaches right to the top of the Conservative party, about its direction of travel towards the next election. There is now something of a consensus among the prime minister's allies that the last Tory election campaign was an unfocused muddle, without a cohesive theme, which tried but failed to conceal its contradictions behind the vacuous slogan: "An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain".

Some senior Tories still place most of the blame for their failure to win an outright majority on a tactical mistake: letting Mr Clegg into the televised leaders' debates, which gifted him the opportunity to present himself as an alternative. A majority of senior Tories now think that there was a deeper, strategic flaw in the Conservative campaign. It was never clear exactly what they were offering because it was never entirely resolved how Mr Cameron wanted to define himself. Was he running as a moderate and a moderniser who had made the Tory party fit to govern again? Or was he offering the electorate a more unabashed leader of the right? Sometimes he was one thing; sometimes he was another.

That confusion remains to this day. So do the same arguments within his party about the best way to secure power. There are those around him who press for the next election campaign to be tightly focused on traditional Tory issues such as welfare, immigration and Europe with a dash of tax cuts if they are at all affordable. Lynton Crosby, the Australian election strategist who is fond of talking about "removing the barnacles from the boat", is a strong voice urging the prime minister to head in that direction. In the camp can be found those Tories who are most possessed by the threat to their right flank from Ukip.

Others around Mr Cameron argue that the more important competition is with the Lib Dems and Labour for middle-ground voters. These Tories contend that they can give up any hope of securing a parliamentary majority if they don't run a broader and more rounded campaign that emphasises those things, such as health and education, that tend to matter most to centrist voters. When I recently asked a senior Tory which way the prime minister would eventually jump, he replied: "I don't know."

So long as he doesn't know, the Bone-heads will continue to fill the vacuum with their mischief.