IT must be the silly season, because politics doesn’t get much sillier than Jacob Rees-Mogg being touted as the next leader of the Conservatives.

Just when you thought Boris Johnson was the Tory epitome of out-of-touch posh boy, along comes Jacob Rees-Mogg. Jacob is famously the Conservative MP for the 18th century, a man who believes that ballpoint pens are alarmingly modern. He is deeply formal in his dress and manner, favouring double-breasted suits in a 1950s style. It is, however, inaccurate to claim that he’d put a tie on in order to take the bins out. He wouldn’t be seen dead taking a bin out. Jacob has staff for that sort of thing.

Things are tossed in the bin after which Jacob no longer sees any reason to consider them further, which is also a good description of what he thinks about the poor.

In fact it’s quite likely that Jacob thinks that bins empty themselves as if by magic. After all, this is what he thinks happens to babies’ nappies. Jacob has six children with increasingly silly names, yet he recently admitted that he’s never changed a nappy. Mind you, to be fair, he is a Conservative MP and his job entails preparing large amounts of foul-smelling waste to get dumped on everyone else, so it’s understandable that he might not want to deal with it when he gets home. That’s what nannies are for.

It’s universally acknowledged that Theresa May’s job as Prime Minister is hanging by the shoogliest of shoogly pegs. After losing the Conservative majority by taking the country into an entirely unnecessary General Election in which she did a fantastic impression of a robot that had overdosed on valium, Tory MPs are not in a forgiving mood. Jacob is favoured by many Tories because they consider him to be one of the party’s leading intellectuals, by which they mean that he can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger.

Jacob’s supposed polite and erudite intellectualism is merely a mask for some very unpleasant politics. He is so viscerally opposed to the EU that he once called for the Tories to go into an alliance with Ukip. He has consistently voted in favour of every cut to social security for the poor, while voting against the mansion tax that would affect his own country estate.

He’s voted against equal marriage, and questions overseas aid and the need for carbon-emission targets. He supports zero-hours contracts and denies that modern employers exploit their workers. For all that he poses as someone who harks back to a kinder and gentler age, his politics are motivated by private profit and private greed.

He does indeed hark back to a previous age, but there’s nothing kinder or gentler about it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re thrown out into the streets by a foul-mouthed boor or by a polite and well-tailored quoter of Latin epigrams, you’re still sleeping in the cold and the rain. All of Jacob’s nastiness and his reactionary bitterness is excused because he’s very polite with it. It’s the mindset that thinks being called out for being reactionary and vile is far worse than actually being reactionary and vile and that the manner of the delivery is far more important than the ugliness and nastiness of the content. It’s the worst kind of snobbery, a vice to which the Conservative party is deeply addicted.

Jacob would deny vehemently that he’s a snob. In a recent interview on Channel 4 News, Jacob chastised presenter Jon Snow for characterising the Conservative response to Brexit as a shambles. A shambles, said Jacob dismissively, is a butcher’s charnel house – the original recorded meaning of the word. Likewise he would claim that he cannot possibly be a snob because the first recorded meaning of the word snob is a shoemaker’s apprentice, a meaning the word had in the 18th century.

It was only later that the word was extended in meaning to describe a person who aped the upper classes, and later still that it came to mean a person who looks down on those considered inferior in class or taste. So Jacob cannot be a snob as he merely wears handmade brogues, he doesn’t assist in the manufacture of them himself.

You might think that if Jacob Rees-Mogg was as erudite and intellectual as he and his supporters effect to believe, then he’d be aware of the etymological fallacy. The etymological fallacy is the mistaken belief that a word means what it is first recorded as meaning, and that words cannot, or should not, change in meaning. It’s a fallacy held by those with a profound misunderstanding of how language works. It’s not even logical, since the first recorded meaning of a word is not necessarily that word’s first meaning. It could have had other meanings before anyone bothered to write it down. The etymological fallacy is beloved by snobs, and I don’t mean 18th-century shoemakers’ apprentices. I didn’t go to Eton and I’m aware of the etymological fallacy. In the erudition stakes it’s West of Scotland comprehensive 1, Eton nil.

The way back to reality is for the Conservative party to tunnel underneath Jacob’s wall of snobbery and the pseudo-intellectualism that politely masks some deeply ugly ideas. But they won’t do that because it’s beneath them.

The fact that this man is being seriously touted as a possible leader of the party only demonstrates that the party is as out of touch with reality as the distant galaxy where Theresa May has come up with her Brexit plans. Tax cutting and the axing of regulations on businesses is precisely the formula that has led the UK into the mess in which it is currently mired, and more of the same is not going to get us out of it.

Jacob’s carefully constructed fogey facade is just that. His reactionary and cruel politics are very real. The fact that this individual is being seriously touted as a potential leader of the UK is a sign that Britain is hopelessly in love with a romanticised image of its past, and incapable of dealing with the realities of its present.