The Mogg and the remarkable William

“Would you like to rewrite for the next edition?” we asked, as forcibly as was appropriate to such a grandee. No he would not, he said politely.

Such self-confident eccentricity was evident from an early age. In his memoir about his own public school days at Charterhouse the novelist Simon Raven conjures up his contemporary William, a scholarly type and a genius at getting out of all manner of unattractive duties (such as doing time in the cadet corps).

William did not play cricket but he was extremely knowledgeable about the game and valued as an umpire. He volunteered to stand in a house match involving a team of a master who had upset him by failing him in a Greek test. He gave one boy out LBW for a ball that hit him on the shoulder, another run out when Mogg himself had impeded him, yet another out caught by the wicket-keeper when he was certainly dropped. And so it went on until the Greek master’s team had lost. “An extraordinary run of misfortune, Sir,” said William.

Father and son, both with a strong and historic vision of England, have a staunch aversion to the EU. In 1993 William brought a (failed) legal case challenging the government’s policy over the Maastricht agreement. Now Jacob is a leading Brexit enthusiast though not a tub-thumper (Jacob is not the sort who thumps a tub).

Strategy or the demands of his sixweek sixth son, or both, have meant Jacob has been very much around this August, a good place to be if you want to fill the gap an absent parliament leaves. Yesterday he was on the Today programme talking about pronunciation, nary (18th century for never) putting a syllable wrong.

JOHN INGHAM IS AWAY