My Jacob a toff? You’re quite wrong, said his twinkly mother
TOP Tories Chris Patten and Jacob Rees-Mogg had a go at each other. It was not so much a Westminster bar brawl as a drawl-on-drawl, a duel with ginger snaps drawn, or two tortoises trying to chew each other’s skull.
The injuries sustained were no greater than if you butted a pillar confected of the very best meringue.
Lord Patten, though wet politically, has a persona as dry as the Melba toast at the Savoy Grill. Sometime Tory chairman, Brussels commissioner and BBC chairman, his lordship is deliciously superior. His voice creaks like the deck timbers of a vintage barque moored at Cowes. He has perfected that slightly pained, throwaway world-weariness with which formerly powerful men console themselves. In his every phrase there is the suggestion that he knows better than today’s decision-makers, were they only sensible enough to consult him.
With our official departure from the EU now just a year away (although there will then be 21 months of horrid transition), the pro and anti Brexit camps held morning events to mark this ‘historic’ moment.
At a venue just off Parliament Square, Lord Patten gave a speech to a group of Remainers. It consisted of very Pattenesque sighs and downbeat barbs. His attacks did not entirely conform to logic yet they were characteristically droll. Brexiteers, he said, lived on ‘dogma pie’ yet they were seeing their desired Brexit being whittled down to not very much. ‘Red lines are turning pink or disappearing entirely,’ said Lord Patten with gooey satisfaction.
Er, it is surely hard for the Brexiteers – so far generally supportive of Theresa May’s negotiating approach – to be manically dogmatic if they are accepting the abandonment of those red lines. But never mind.
Lord Patten’s cropped grey hair was set off by a hint of perma-tan, testament to his plump pensions, decent access to winter sun and a hint of the ever-youthful Dorian Grays about the 73-year-old. HIS
wardrobe was studiously crumpled, favouring a cavernous jacket that no longer fit quite as it once may have done. It is a look that is, in its way, as distinctively British as that of the proBrexit Rees-Mogg, whom Lord Patten proceeded to attack.
‘Jacob is much better than he has allowed himself to seem,’ croaked his lordship. He teased Mr Rees-Mogg for holding the same views now that he did as an ‘eccentric’ eight-year-old. ‘He has allowed himself a bit to be taken over by image and caricature.’ An hour later, Mr Rees-Mogg made a speech of his own on the far side of St James’s Park. The audience included his mother, Lady Rees-Mogg, charming and twinkly. She told me it was quite wrong to describe Jacob as a toff. Her own father had been a Welsh tenant farmer.
In his speech, which he rattled off like a Latin grace at Eton, Mr Rees-Mogg, spoke optimistically about looming British independence. He urged our negotiators to be prepared to tell the EU to get stuffed. Was the EU prepared for the eventuality of ‘no deal’? He thought not, and their lack of preparedness made our position stronger, he argued. Without our money they were facing a financial crisis. On the surface, the darksuited Rees-Mogg, 48, looked the more ancient figure.
Yet his can- do confidence and his spry humour invigorated the room, including one gent in the sort of battle fatigues worn by militia backwoodsmen in the Appalachian Mountains. He hailed Mrs May’s confident handling of the Russia crisis and compared that to the craven surrender of the British establishment after Suez, when Macmillan burst into tears. He argued clearly that the EU was bad for the lower-paid. AND
what about Chris Patten? Mr Rees-Mogg said Patten was an old family friend whom he had known since infancy. He did not intend to slag him off. He merely noted that when his lordship was Governor of Hong Kong he was hotly pro-democracy. Why was he now in favour of the antidemocratic EU?