Once again, Lost in Showbiz must take up its well-thumbed copy of the Book of Revelation, and search through the apocalypse harbingers for the words: "And it shall come to pass that Jeremy Kyle shall imagine himself a serious thinker . . . "

Jeremy, of course, has always taken himself seriously. How could he not? His job is revealing the results of DNA tests on telly. That's the adorable thing about babies: they're too stupid to have even heard about release forms.

No matter that a judge famously described his programme as "human bear-baiting", or that ITV has had to issue a litany of excruciating denials about how guests are treated before going on air, my favourite being their response to accusations that they fired up some of them with booze. With exquisite indignance, the network chuntered: "Two of the guests were given alcohol to counteract withdrawal symptoms." Ah, I see. Do forgive the error.

Now, with a US version of his chatshow in the pipeline, Jeremy's self-confidence remains undimmed. You may care to know that the trait he most deplores in himself is "people-pleasing". Asked recently what the worst thing anyone had ever said to him was, he revealed: "A rent-a-yob once bellowed, 'Oi, Kyle, you're a cunt!' through my car window as my then teenage daughter sat frozen beside me."

Can you bear it? The coarsening of public life must be a particular agony for the steward of shows such as Brother, I'll Prove I'm the Father of Your Ex-Girlfriend's Baby. Indeed, perhaps it is this puritan zeal that is driving Jeremy in increasingly ambitious directions.

It began with his most recent book, described by the publisher as comprising Jeremy's pensées "on a huge variety of topics: from the craziness of becoming a household name and the struggles of parenting when organising his baby son's 150-strong christening to the pitfalls of middle age and his strong views on the current government". This compendium of rants is entitled You Couldn't Make It Up, which would seem the crudest of attempts to insert himself into the notional gap between Richard Littlejohn and Jeremy Clarkson. (Note: the thought of Jeremy inserting himself into a physical gap between Richard Littlejohn and Jeremy Clarkson is too "specialist" a riff even for a column with a taste bar as low as this one. We merely throw it out there for the benefit of Richard, who spends a substantial part of each morning Googling himself, and will now have confusingly enticing thoughts of himself and Clarkson sandwiching Kyle as today's mental screensaver. Expect another frothingly insecure column about how gay people are destroying Britain by Monday.)

But even the book now seems small beer, with recent developments indicating that Jeremy sees himself as not so much a TV presenter as part of the very social fabric of the nation.

Witness the comment piece he penned for Wednesday's Sun. "When economist William Beveridge dreamed up the postwar welfare state," began Jeremy, "he wanted to fight five 'giant evils' – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. Fast forward 65 years and it seems the last New Labour government grew an Unfair State that fuelled – not fought – one of those evils: idleness."

Mmm. There's no sense pointing out that without idleness, Jeremy's daytime polygraphs-and-pissheads show would have no viewers. Jeremy is a former gambling addict whose programme has been sponsored by a gambling website, so he's hardly going to worry about a little contradiction like that. Indeed, in many ways he is the perfect celebrity face for the Sun's recently launched "war on benefit scroungers". (God, don't you wish it were an actual war? Could there be any more satisfying spectacle than seeing the paper's staff face up to said scroungers in a pitched battle on a vast plain? I won't insult you by stating the obvious outcome, but suffice to say it would be like Zulu Dawn out there.)

Anyway, were Wednesday's outing not enough, yesterday Jeremy was back with a whole page column in which he penned a hymn to the coalition's austerity cuts. The evidence seems plain. Slowly but undeniably, Kyle is positioning himself as a social reformer, at the same time as penning such crass little love-letters to the Cameron government that the suspicion can only be that he is angling for some kind of confected czar role.

Or as Jeremy puts it: "Nowadays I wonder if we need a 'beverage report' to see how much of the £192bn welfare budget is wasted on booze."

You may be on the point of spotting who regards himself as just the public intellectual for the job.

Ultimately, though, there's a certain irony to the fact that Jeremy regards the existence of scroungers as evidence of how far we have degenerated as a society in the decades since the Beveridge report. After all, surely that same degeneration would be far more eloquently illustrated by the unstoppable rise of a man paid to violate children's right to privacy on national telly?