Jacob: A ‘barmaid’s idea of a gentleman’

JACOB REES-MOGG has hit back after a pro-Remain former Tory MP described him as ‘a barmaid’s idea of a gentleman’.

Matthew Parris criticised Mr Rees-Mogg as he laid into ‘Brexit ultras’ who he said were ‘so blinded by zealotry’ they thought it was possible senior civil servants could ‘cook the figures’ on the cost of leaving the EU.

Responding to the ‘barmaid’ comment, Mr ReesMogg said: ‘I take it as a compliment. Unlike Mr Parris, I’m not snooty about barmaids.’

Mr Parris, who is now a newspaper columnist, previously worked at the Foreign Office, as Margaret Thatcher’s correspondence clerk, and was Conservative MP for West Derbyshire.

He wrote of Mr Rees-Mogg in The Times on Saturday: ‘Wrong-footed, his good manners depart and snarls break through the politesse. His cloak of courtesy slipping so easily on and off his shoulders, Rees-Mogg deserves the writer Robert Harris’s appraisal, “a barmaid’s idea of a gentleman”.

‘Barmaids deserve better, though. They see through men more easily than the eager young Tory boys of the ConservativeHome website.’