We won’t be fobbed off by having our tums tickled by patronising alien rulers who don’t share our instincts

When Cameron panicked and caved in to pressure to introduce a bill guaranteeing an EU referendum in 2017 (when he’ll be long gone), the Tory Right was distinctly ungrateful. They were supposed to gurn and tug their forelocks and say, “Thank ‘ee, young master – we’ll shut our mouths from now on, and we promise, cross our ‘earts, not to vote for that there UKIP. Bless ‘ee and your lovely lady wife” – but they went on moaning and asking for more. Why?

Well, for a start, they can’t bear the man. Having signally failed to deliver a Tory majority at the last election, he took to insulting his core voters on a regular basis by rubbing their pink little noses in a series of liberal (and Liberal) policies, while sucking up to Guardian readers who hadn’t voted for him and who anyone but a Tory moderniser could have told him never would. But the real reason why the referendum bill – and a smattering of other red-meat, right-leaning initiatives – won’t appease traditional Conservatives and won’t attract middle-of-the-roaders is that we feel as if we’re being governed by the representatives of a foreign power: Cameron and Osborne are as alien to us as Roman governors were to the Britons or as French barons were to the Saxons. Their contempt for us is almost palpable – and the fear that’s beginning to show in their eyes is hardly less infuriating. (The reason Labour and the Lib Dems are as unpopular as the Tories is clear: Clegg and Miliband are as alien to their traditional party supporters as Cameron is to his.)

Cameron, with his ridiculous high-speed rail link, his obsession with gay marriage, his enthusiasm for dragging us into yet another civil war in yet another unpleasant Arab hell-hole, his determination to go on squandering money we don’t have on foreign aid while destroying our armed forces, his refusal to countenance cuts in spending on education and the NHS (as if a lack of money was the problem with either), his pathetic attempt to force universities to accept students on the basis of their ethnicity or their family’s relative poverty rather than academic ability, his sheer wetness when it comes to halting immigration or expelling foreign terrorists, his embarrassing toadying to Barack Obama – with all these things, Cameron has demonstrated that he shares absolutely none of the instincts of the Tory tribe which elected him.

So when he finally promises to give us our EU referendum, or to get tough with prisoners, or to introduce automatic life-means-life sentences for cop-killers, we don’t feel in the least gratified, because it’s all so desperate and phoney and condescending: we know he thinks these policies are all vulgar and populist and uncivilised, and that he’s just going through the motions in order to keep his fractious serfs quiet for a bit so he can get on with the real business of government.

We’re fractious because we’re experiencing cognitive dissonance resulting from Cameron and his clique’s inability to understand what’s going on inside out heads or our hearts. He seems to find difficulty in empathising with us – just as Edward Heath did – and that makes it very difficult for us to empathise with him. And that’s the reason why we warm so readily to Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage: whatever their faults – and they are no doubt legion - we sense that they share our fundamental political instincts, and that if it was them introducing legislation of which we approved, they’d be doing it because they thought it the right thing to do rather than as a means of keeping us off their backs for a few weeks.

Europe is nowhere near the top of the list of our most pressing concerns – but it has become a symbol of our cognitive dissonance: it perfectly captures our sense of being ruled by aliens who neither understand nor like us, and for whom we are simply a means to an end.