Jacob Rees-Mogg is good for a cheap laugh – but beware his true-blue colours
Jacob Rees-Mogg, currently second favourite to take over leadership of the Conservative Party, is a politician I’ve watched with involuntary wonderment for over a decade. This is because day-to-day Rees-Mogg is quite impossible not to follow in jovial befuddlement. For this purpose, I understand the growing
#moggmentum which has placed a man who appears on Question Time resembling a living, breathing Bash Street Kids “posho” caricature as a frontrunner to save the Tories from a political quagmire.
Mogg is a roaming Monty Python cameo; all briefcase, flappy legs and simmering patriarchal righteousness. He is a Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer-style riff on how our class system thrives, with his six children furnished with the names of 8th Century saints and Anglo-Saxon bishops. Rees-Mogg says he has never changed a nappy. In 2014 he went canvassing with his former nanny Veronica, the woman who used to wipe his own arse.
At this point, again, as we tiptoe through the hilarity and comedic open goals, I must underline that hilarious old Moggy, the columnist’s gift, the living meme, is now ahead in the leadership race of one-time favourite Boris Johnson. Interestingly Johnson, a fellow funny outsider turned stalking horse, won hearts by his ability to seem utterly harmless. Snuggly, even. But Rees-Mogg has no appetite for this. The “Mogg doesn’t do nappies” comment might have finished any other politician, but from his mouth seems both feasible and thoroughly moot. There are women to deal with shitty nappies. Rees-Mogg merely provides his magnificent sperm to create babies and subsequent under-arm bowling lessons in half-term holidays.
Right now, Rees-Mogg feels to many Tories a safer bet than Chancellor Philip Hammond, Home Secretary Amber Rudd and Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson. In fact, Rees-Mogg’s fiercest rival presently is David Davis, with a 20 per cent implied chance of victory versus Rees-Mogg’s 12 per cent, according to odds aggregator BetData.
The political landscape is auspiciously porridgy of late. Jeremy Corbyn’s X Factor-style journey from scruffy-hemmed yoghurt-knitter to put-together, soundbite-delivering cult act has proven that all tangents are viable. And over on Mumsnet – the web hangout of the demented lactating house-arrested overthinker – #moggmentum is growing.
“He’s just so deliciously of a type, ”was a Mogg-supporting quote I read recently. If Mumsnet love ReesMogg, he’s onto a good thing. Never underestimate the power of Mumsnet to fuck with the political status quo. These women can shut down a jungle zip-slide party at the first hint of non-authorised unrefined play snack. They could unravel the fortunes of the Tory Party and be back on the “Am I being unreasonable?” board discussing vaginal dryness by CBeebies bedtime.
Of course, the problem with making you laugh about a subject that makes me laugh is that we normalise the threat of yesteryear men like Rees-Mogg. He has tickled his way to 36,000 Instagram followers and a “Ready for Rees-Mogg” campaign petition stands at over 20,000 signatures. In a Tory landscape which is turning off the under-50s in droves, here comes a dry-humoured cartoon Conservative colossus who will look Owen Jones straight in the eye and tell him: “I’m not in favour of new age drippiness”.
Words like these are balm to voters who feel dearly that what we need right now in post-Brexit Britain are strong, clear, strident thoughts. Theresa May, it should be noted, made considerable headway from June 2016 through to the general election with similar promises of clear-eyed, non-emotional thinking. This lasted until the campaign trail where the one, singular, full-throated policy May felt confident to give voice to transpired to be bringing back fox-hunting.
The relegalisation of blood sports was the incendiary topic on virtually no one’s mind at that point. Terrorism, the European chaos, growing homeland religious and racial intolerance, yes. Not reopening the wounds of a bygone nineties hot topic that pits family against family, town against country.
If Rees-Mogg gains power, it will be curious to observe the “non-drippy” hobby-horse topics he may apply himself to rather than tackle the roaring bin fire which is Brexit. Rees-Mogg is against same sex marriage, just like his DUP chums. He wants to repeal the Human Rights Act. He thinks zero hours contracts are a
favourable thing and seemingly has no interest or urgency on climate change. With six children to date, I can only guess haphazardly at his beliefs on contraception.
“I’ve made no pretence to be a modern man, at all, ever,” he told Nigel Farage in an interview last week. To steal and meddle with Maya Angelou, it feels that Rees-Mogg is a person telling us clearly who he is. It’s time, I feel, that we believed him.