IT’S JOHNSON v MOGG ( NOT THOSE ONES — THEIR SISTERS! )
Tin hats on! The Brexit big beasts’ glamorous siblings go to war for the West country vote
JUST days ago it looked as though Moggmentum would be the new political catchphrase de nos jours, as Jacob Rees-Mogg’s younger sister, Annunziata, was unveiled as the glamorous face of Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party for the European elections.
Now, before a leaflet has even been delivered, the opposing Change UK party – set up by The Independent Group of MPs – has hit back with their own alluring candidate: Boris Johnson’s little sister Rachel.
And what makes it all so intriguing is that the two women now on the front line of the great Brexit divide are taking on their better known siblings.
So who’s who when it comes to the Moggs versus the Johnsons and what are the similarities and differences between these two rival political dynasties?
IS IT IN THE GENES?
RACHEL JOHNSON, 53: One of four children of the broadcaster, writer, environmentalist and former Tory MEP Stanley, 78, and his first wife, artist Charlotte JohnsonWahl. Political siblings: Boris, 54, a long and chequered career (and love life) as a journalist, politician and some-time presenter of Have I Got News For You, he’s an arch-Brexiteer and favourite to replace Theresa May as leader of the Tory Party. Joe, 47, the youngest and widely regarded as the brightest of the Johnson clan, a banker turned journalist and then politician. Like his father, he is a Europhile through and through who supports the campaign for a ‘people’s vote’. Johnson has three children with writer Ivo Dawnay whom she married in 1992. They lives in Notting Hill and an Exmoor farmhouse.
ANNUNZIATA REES-MOGG, 40: One of five children of Lord Rees-Mogg, a former editor of The Times who was described as a pillar of the Establishment ‘virtually from cradle to grave’, and his wife Gillian Morris. Political siblings: Jacob, 49, a successful hedge funder before he became Tory MP for Somerset North East in 2010, he inherited his unashamed Euroscepticism from his father and is the dominant figure in the European Reasearch Group of hard-core Brexiteer MPs. Annunziata has a daughter with ex-Army officer Matthew Glanville whom she married in 2010, and lives in Lincolnshire.
THE NANNY FACTOR
JOHNSON: Growing up in Brussels where Stanley was working as a civil servant, the Johnsons employed Norland nanny Mary Kidd. Recalling the first time she washed Boris’s hair, she said: ‘He had his pants on in the bath, because he was embarrassed, so I simply allowed him to see me in the bath covered with bubbles. Next time I washed his hair he didn’t have his pants on.’ A 6ft chain smoker with a rasping voice, she became a second mother to the children after their mother became ill.
REES-MOGG:: Veronica Crook, 77, has been part of the Rees-Mogg family for half a century. After helping raise the Rees-Mogg children, she moved to Hong Kong with Jacob when he began his business career in 1994. She came out of retirement when he started his own family and was back in the headlines recently after rushing to confront a group of class-war protesters when they ambushed the family outside their Central London home. Last week Annunziata complained that Jacob had ‘stolen’ Miss Crook for his family.
SCHOOL DAYS
JOHNSON: Winsford First School, Primrose Hill Primary, the European School of Brussels, Ashdown House, East Sussex; Bryanston, Dorset (she was expelled for ‘attitude’ problems – drinking, smoking and hitch-hiking), St Paul’s Girls, and New College, Oxford, where she read classics and graduated with a 2:1.
REES-MOGG: Godolphin & Latymer girls’ school, West London.
EARNING A CRUST
JOHNSON: A writer and broadcaster, she began her career as a graduate trainee at the Financial Times and has been a columnist for several national newspapers. In 2009, she became the ninth editor in 125 years of The Lady, the genteel bible of the land- owning classes, which she likened to ‘ a 1950s care home in Sark’. The magazine’s co- owner described Miss Johnson as ‘vain, mad, snobbish and obsessed with penises’ – and she may have had a point. Her novel Shire Hell, won the 2008 Bad Sex in Fiction prize.
REES-MOGG: After leaving school in 1997 and eschewing university, Annunziata took on a string of jobs in investment banking, public relations, journalism and publishing. In 1999, she experienced tragedy when her boyfriend James Sanders, 24, fell to his death from her Pall Mall flat after trying to climb a drain pipe five floors up.
POLITICS
JOHNSON: A member of the Conservative Party from 2008 to 2011, she very publicly switched to the Lib Dems in the run-up to the 2017 general election.
REES-MOGG: She was selected as the Tory parliamentary candidate for Somerton and Frome in Somerset, but failed to take the seat from the Lib Dems in 2010. It was claimed that in advance of the poll, then Prime Minister David Cameron asked her to ‘de-toff’ her name for political purposes to Nancy Mogg. She refused, replying: ‘I would rather remain Annunziata Rees-Mogg’. A year later she was dropped from the Tory candidates’ list, to the fury of her brother. Says Jacob: ‘My sister is much cleverer and more charismatic than I am… and is a great catch for the Brexit Party – they are extremely lucky to have her.’
AND ON EUROPE?
JOHNSON: Fanatical Europhile. Campaigned for Remain throughout the Referendum. Stripped off (almost) on Sky News during a debate on Europe earlier this year, complaining it was ‘hard to get your voice heard about Brexit nowadays’. Yesterday she revealed she would stand as a candidate in the European elections for Change UK, the pro-Remain party set up by the Independent Group of MPs, declaring that Brexit was ‘rubbing out my children’s prospects and chances of living and travelling and working in Europe.’ She added: ‘These are chances that the politicians who decided to campaign to Leave have enjoyed themselves.’ Not least big brother Boris!
REES-MOGG: A Eurosceptic with a healthy contempt for the EU.
PUBLICITY LOVING?
JOHNSON: Of course! She’s a Johnson. She was the second person evicted in the 2018 Celebrity Big Brother series.
REES-MOGG: Only when absolutely necessary ( although she once modelled a pair of five-inch spiked red heels for the Daily Telegraph).