With the tone of a viscount’s gloves, Rees-mogg seduced radio listeners
The difference was fascinating. Normally when a politician hosts a phone-in on LBC radio, you can hear an edge in the callers’ voices. A suspicion. A distrust. Like the low growl of a dog at the approach of unfamiliar footsteps.
Yet when Jacob Rees-mogg – Tory MP for NE Somerset, and supposed future leadership candidate – hosted a phone-in yesterday morning, we heard little of the usual cynicism. At times, his callers’ eagerness sounded almost puppyish. They practically laid a stick at his feet, and beat their tails in the hope he would throw it. One caller asked him whether it was true that the UK owed money to the EU.
“Not a brass farthing,” replied Mr Rees-mogg. “That’s what I suspected,” said the caller gratefully.
Why Mr Rees-mogg should get a gentler ride than other politicians, I’m not sure. It may simply be that people respect him for what they see as his candour, and for his unfashionable views. But perhaps also, in part, it’s the hypnotic effect of his manner – arousing in the English breast a long-dormant instinct for deference.
In particular, that voice, with its costume-drama grandeur, its drawling languor, sounds like an Edwardian candelabra, a billiard room door, a first-class claret, a viscount’s gloves. At one point during the phone-in Mr Rees-mogg made a passing reference to Leicester Square. Or, as he pronounced it, Leicester Skwaaah.
Mr Rees-mogg is not actually an aristocrat, but he assumes the air of one: the supreme placidity, the imperturbable civility. The worst he can ever bring himself to say about anything is that it represents “a great sadness”. He said this twice: about George Osborne’s hostility to Theresa May, and about the reduced price of the morning-after pill. Otherwise, he sailed along as smoothly as a Bentley.
Such unruffled confidence may, in difficult times, seem reassuring. But one day, it may be looked back on as complacency. The future of the Northern Irish border, he declared, is not “the problem it’s been written up as … it’s the EU’S problem.” The looming influx of chlorine-washed chicken from America is “not something we need worry about”. When companies say Brexit is already damaging business, it’s merely “an excuse for [their own] poor management”. The proliferation of food banks, meanwhile, is “rather uplifting”, because it shows how “good and compassionate” the better-off are.
Once again, this improbable man of the people was asked whether he could be the next prime minister. As usual, he waved the idea away as if it were an over-attentive footman. It was, he said, pure “summer fluff ”, prompted by “some splendid gentleman in Rotherham having ‘Moggmentum’ tattooed on his chest”. In any case, he insisted, “No one serious thinks I’m a credible candidate.”
No one serious thought Donald Trump was a credible candidate, either. They were right, but it didn’t stop him winning.