In a world grown weary of politics as usual, anyone peculiar is in with a shout; if they can sound funny-peculiar, all the better. Even a weak joke or two these days is worth a shed-load of worthy policies for improving people’s lives. In the decadent politics of entertainment, maybe the one who draws the widest smile wins.

The left is by tradition short on jokes, preferring earnest statistics on the social impact of policy. But on the right, jovial lightheartedness and a very little wit promotes exceedingly nasty politicians with unspeakable views if they can only perform engagingly enough on Have I Got News for You or Question Time.

Thus some of the most reactionary politicians worm their way into our national affections as jolly good fellows, their jokey personas cleverly disguising what would otherwise sound too blatantly boorish. Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have been joined by Jacob Rees-Mogg as the next comedy headliner, plugging reactionary policies with disarmingly merry displays of faux self-deprecation. The Conservative Home site polled party members on leadership contenders and Rees-Mogg was written in “spontaneously”, ending up second after David Davis. Below the radar a major operation has swung into action on the internet, with Moggmentum drawing thousands of supporters and Facebook likes. This famous “MP for the 18th century” is an overnight adept on Twitter and Instagram: Matthew Parris reports Facebook Messenger sending out Ready for Rees-Mogg encouragements to all and sundry in the Torysphere.

Even the usually canny Jess Phillips is beguiled into observing admiringly that though she disagrees with him, “he is no identikit politician; he is always completely authentic”. But authentic what? About as authentic as that Downton Abbey shot where they left a plastic bottle on the mantlepiece. The double-breasted posh-speak, Latin tags and ludicrous names for his six children are all pastiche panache, a country house charade well-crafted to distract from what is genuinely authentic – an extremely reactionary and self-regarding brand of every-man-for-himself Conservatism.

He may succeed, since his views are his party’s core values writ large. While pretending that his hat is not in the ring – but not ruling it out – on Monday he penned a mini-manifesto splashed across the front page of the Telegraph. It’s worth scrutinising for all the elements that chime with his party. A rampant Brexiteer, he is anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion, an advocate for the Murdochs and a Trump defender. But for a condensed, if pompous, résumé of Thatcherism, peppered with a host of well-worn Tory tics, it’s well worth a read.

Here is the complete lexicon of Toryism – from climate-change denial to praise for Iain Duncan Smith’s disability cuts

Here is the complete lexicon of Toryism – from climate-change denial and fracking enthusiasm, to praise for Iain Duncan Smith’s disability cuts, from attacking the BBC and the licence fee to abhorrence of regulation and all “interference”. He decries “the nanny knows best” approach of the state, though that sits oddly with his frequent whimsical praise for the discipline and order imposed by his own old nanny.

Naturally, he wants to cut all taxes – stamp duty, income tax and corporation tax. But expect no list of public services he would cut to cover those gigantic revenue losses. No, instead he has his own magic money-tree. He claims that cutting taxes, Laffer-curve style, brings in more revenue. He says corporation tax cuts already did that: if that puzzles you, turn to the IFS analysis that shows far from bringing higher revenues, they “cost at least £16.5bn a year”, some of the losses made up by other taxes, such as the bank levy. Rees-Mogg, for all his academic affectations, is a fact-free zone when it comes to his policies.

Margaret Thatcher used to say, “You will always spend the pound in your pocket better than the state will,” and that’s his key theme: “Generally people will spend their own money more effectively than the government and there is no money at all, except that earned by the private sector.” That’s the heart of it – wrong at every point. There can be no successful business without a strong state to guarantee property rights and security, the education, transport and health of its workforce, without investing in skills, research and development and infrastructure while ensuring fair competition by regulating against enterprise-crushing cartels. Try running a business in a failed state. Similar EU countries with a state far larger than ours as a proportion of GDP – Germany or Scandinavia – have far stronger growth. We lag ever further behind in growth and productivity as this government follows George Osborne’s trajectory to shrink the state by 2020 to its smallest since the 1930s.

But there you go again, being boring, earnest and facty while the swashbuckling free marketeers don’t bother with all that, letting the devil take the hindmost while standing on their own two feet. Rees-Mogg concludes with a call for “freeing individuals to maximise their own successes”. But “freeing” people from what exactly? A well-financed police force, the NHS, the BBC, clean air and climate repair? I doubt he asks people what buys them the things they value most in life. Their tax pound is what can buy security, health, education, beautiful public spaces, fine public buildings, care in old age, protection in adversity, well-kept parks, museums, stadiums, art galleries, swimming pools – and everything that makes people proudest of their country, things bought and build in the past, the present or invested for the future. He calls for “tilting the scales back towards the individual”, yet the values inherent in all those state-financed goods are worth more than anything an individual’s pound can buy in a shop.

With all his foppish foibles, his show of elaborate old-world courtesy is only a disguise for the deep discourtesy of extreme snobbery and contempt for hoi polloi. Sublime self-love and self-confidence will carry a man a long way – but to the very top? The Tory party would indeed have taken leave of its senses. But the current political delirium may get worse, as the country confronts a precipitous national decline. What was once a small, eccentric coterie of anti-EU fanatics has succeeded against all odds in mainstreaming their peculiar nationalist fantasy – and there is no knowing how much worse things may get. Just look at the state of this cabinet of chaos and remember what we have learned in the last year: nothing improbable is impossible.

• Polly Toybee is a Guardian columnist