If you haven’t seen Simon Pegg’s viral video about Rishi Sunak yet, you’re in for a real treat. It’s a genius bit of satire, a brutal send-up of left-leaning, self-righteous. middle-class midwits. In it, the cult Brit comic actor turned bona fide Hollywood star does a pitch-perfect impression of the sort of unkempt craft-beer botherer who gets all of his news from James O’Brien clips. In character, Pegg rages against Sunak for daring to say people should learn maths up to 18.

‘Rishi Sunak wants a f***ing drone army of data-entering robots. F*** the Tories’, he thunders. Genius.

Only it isn’t really. I watched it, hoping it was a joke. I like Spaced and it’s a shame to see talented people be so basic and preachy when it comes to politics. But it seems like this is actually what Pegg thinks. What he reckons passes for interesting or impassioned political commentary. Something he thought was so right-on he just had to share it with the world. The clip has gone viral, partly because of his tribe loving it and partly because it is so ridiculous. In it, the scruffily-dressed Pegg (net worth £20million) appears genuinely incensed about Sunak’s proposal.

‘What about arts and humanities and fostering this country’s amazing reputation for creativity and self-expression?’, he rages. ‘What a pr**k!’

The scruffily-dressed Pegg (net worth £20million) appears genuinely incensed about Sunak’s proposal

It was clearly intended as a righteous blast against an out-of-touch Tory Prime Minister, obsessed with money and spreadsheets at the cost of childhood misery and creativity. But you could just as easily say it showed how out of touch Pegg is.

I thought Sunak’s proposal was naff, too, given the scale of the crises currently facing the country. But to suggest we should just be urging kids to read poetry under a tree instead is surely a bit of a luxury belief. According to government data, half of working-age adults have the numeracy level of a primary-school child. We are well below average among OECD countries. That’s a big problem, even if Pegg can’t see it from his privileged perch.

‘I dropped maths as soon as I could and I’ve never needed it other than the skillset I acquired at the age of 12’, smirks Pegg, who was educated at the King’s School in Gloucester, where fees start at just under three grand a term. It reminded me of those posh journalists who take to Twitter every results day to tell the world how bad their A-level results were and how that never held them back.

But then I suppose that’s the thing about the lame anti-Toryism of people like Pegg, Lily Allen or indeed our dear old James O’Brien. In its own way, ostentatious Tory-bashing is an expression of status. Not financial or class status, necessarily – although Pegg, Allen and O’Brien are all wealthy and went to posh schools. But moral status. Part of the reason so much liberal-left commentary about the Tories is so asinine, so lacking in any insight, so reliant on out-of-date caricatures, so hysterical and unconvincing, is that it’s not intended to be insightful or convincing or even coherent. It’s just a showy declaration that the Tory-basher in question is a good person, a smart person, a sophisticated person, a caring person, unlike those quasi-fascistic Conservatives and the ragbag of ruddy-cheeked toffs and Red Wall bigots who voted them in last time around.

This is why the anti-Tory hysterics of people like Pegg, even to those of us who aren’t Tories and oppose much of what this government is doing, can be so grating. It’s lame, repetitive and all about them. And it really is ripe for satire.