Workington Man is dead; long live Workington Man. In the three weeks he has graced this Earth, the Conservatives’ dream ticket to election victory – an imagined 45-plus northern leaver, ex-Labour voter and rugby league fan, without a university degree – has been rebuked and rejoiced in a cycle of binge and purge.

Some journalists pronounced him deceased almost as soon as he was invented by right-leaning thinktank Onward. “‘Workington Man’ is just the latest depressing political caricature,” read the Financial Times’s glum banner. Lewis Goodall of Sky News, who travelled up to the Cumbria constituency where this theoretical voter supposedly lives, tweeted “Been in Workington for less than 10 mins when someone says: ‘this Workington Man stuff. What a stupid southern idea. We’ve all been laughing about it.’”

But the tabloids persisted – “Workington Man IS backing Boris Johnson” cried a defiant Mail on 1 November – with the term to describe not just a man from Workington (population 25,000) but the type of northern voter they think will vote Tory to “get Brexit done”. Yet even the most enthusiastic of the blue-supporting redtops haven’t been able to make it stick entirely. Hours after the Sun hailed the new “Workington class” as key to the success of the Tories, the newspaper published a story on its website centred around vox pops from locals calling it a “patronising” stereotype and a “70s cliche”.

By 11 November, Workington Man’s allure had already faded – and the Mail was touting someone else, “Walsall Man”, another former Labour voter, this time in the Midlands, who was also ready to vote Tory. “Forget Workington Man,” it heartlessly told its readers. “It’s Walsall Man that could be crucial to swinging this General Election”. In his first week of life, the national papers published 38 pieces mentioning Workington Man; this week there were only two.

Workington Man is merely the latest punt at repeating the success of “Essex Man”, the epochal Thatcherite everyman who succeeded where others have collapsed under the weight of public derision or just disappeared into the ether. Trawl the archives of political journalism and you will find a motley crew of disregarded protagonists. Unsuccessful Tory leader William Hague’s 2001 target, the “pebbledash people”, were a staid, suburban variant on Blair’s “Mondeo Man” (a delocalised Essex man) and “Worcester Woman” (a traditional Tory voter ready to defect to Labour). The pebbledash people “distrusted excitement, seeing it as a threat to the reassuring certainties of life behind the knobbly frontages of their trademark homes”, according to the Telegraph. They also distrusted Hague enough to allow Blair a second term in office.

The “Bacardi Breezer generation” on the other hand were an apathetic 18-24 demographic targeted by New Labour who, despite their alcopop epithet, aspired to a job and a house over lounging in lecture halls and sticky student union bars. In 2010 “Holby City woman”, a target of Cameron’s Conservatives, was reportedly a woman in her 40s who, aside from her keenness on the long-running BBC drama (the days before Netflix truly were a dark age), was characterised as a once Labour-voting diehard who would now accept austerity following the 2008 crash.

While the man from Workington is the latest fall guy for a journalistic need for simple storytelling, it can be argued that his existence serves another purpose. What these archetypes have in common is they personify a voter who is willing to accept policies that would take the UK further to the right. More often than not, they act as a political tool for the advancement of an agenda of cuts to public services and lower taxes for the rich.

With Workington Man, it did not take long for the mask to slip: “The Tories’ failure to grasp that Workington Man wants tax cuts could cost them crucial votes”, read a Telegraph headline. The piece was written by the CEO of the rightwing lobby group for low taxation, the Taxpayers Alliance, who used this mythical gritty regional voter to argue that the people at large desire the same small-state outcome that the lobby group has spent its existence campaigning for.

Essex Man was utilised in similar fashion. He was invented by the Sunday Telegraph journalist Simon Heffer in 1990 to describe a “young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren” worker in London’s financial centre, whose roots lay in Labour-voting east London but who apparently now favoured extremely low taxation and disliked the welfare state. He had become, Heffer wrote with relish, “breathtakingly rightwing”.

Coming at the end of Margaret Thatcher’s career as prime minister, Essex Man was more a personification of the success of her policies than a floating voter she needed to convince. But he would still prove useful in elections to come after usage of the term exploded in the popular and political press in the early 1990s. Essex Man’s rise as a supposed barometer of public opinion was powered in no small part by the wishes of the politicians and journalists behind it. They told a story that was both extremely general (Essex Man was a heterosexual male who desired improved material circumstances) and extremely specific (Essex Man loved the Conservative party because they promised to improve his material circumstances through low taxation and a raid on welfare spending, under the guise of promoting meritocracy).

The genius of Essex Man was the licence he gave politicians and the tabloid press to mobilise the figure’s apparent authenticity to push policies further rightwards. Essex Man benefited New Labour as much as the Tories – his rejection of John Major dramatised a national shift from blue to red, his apparent softening on the issue of voting Labour proving that the Blair government was right to stay closer to Thatcherite economics than many in the party were comfortable with.

Rather than providing a useful shorthand for voters or journalists, though, the real power of imagined constituents such as Essex and Workington Man is to give credence to the political delusion that the country agrees with politicians’ rightwing beliefs. Perhaps the biggest example of this has been witnessed since the EU referendum in 2016, when a 52%-48% close call has turned into an unequivocal cry for a hard Brexit, helped along by the Faragist mantra of the “real people”.

Happily, the vocal doubts surrounding Workington Man suggest these duplicitous games of anthropological taxonomy could one day be consigned to the dustbin. It wouldn’t be before time. No single party, politician or journalist should be able to claim to speak for all members of a demographic group. Above all, the strange Frankenstein’s monsters of Essex and Workington Man are shorthand stereotypes that deny the complexity and vitality of the local. And, in the end, they represent little more than the contempt in which the rightwing media and politicians in the UK hold the electorate.

• Tim Burrows is an assistant production editor at the Guardian