Nanny says he’d make an excellent Prime Minister!
Wouldn’t dream of swearing. But damn me if the ‘blighter’ (a favourite drive his Jag. And as for whether he’d like to replace Mrs May...
driving at 100mph and lets his two-year-old son drive his Jaguar;
Admitted that he could have been a devout Muslim instead of a Catholic;
Rejects Left-wing jibes that he is a ‘fascist’, saying he is against corporal and capital punishment;
Said he had never been ‘really drunk’.
Rees-Mogg’s hardline views on Europe are well known but he is a softie as a dad. ‘I wasn’t smacked and I don’t want my children hit,’ he said. ‘If you want to hit your children, it is usually because you have lost control.’
He leaves it to wife Helena to keep order. ‘I’m wet but she sticks to what she says. When they have a go at me for two minutes I say, “All right, then.” Nanny is pleased if they’re in bed when I get home or else they all start racing about.’
Literally in the case of two-yearold Alfred. Dad lets him sit on his knee in his Jag as they cruise up and down the driveway of their home. ‘He holds the steering wheel while I do the accelerator,’ he revealed. ‘If I put my hands on the wheel, he says, “No, Alfred do it.” As soon as I get home, he says “Daddy, car!” and we toddle out.’
Rees-Mogg’s unblinking faith in Brexit is matched by a passionate religious conviction which dates back to his upbringing as a Catholic. Had he ever wondered if he would have been a devout Muslim if he had been raised by a Muslim family? ‘There’s a lot of truth in that,’ he said.
He rails against the arbitrary power of Brussels bureaucrats but has no qualms about t he untrammelled authority wielded in another European capital, Rome. He likes the ‘clearly set out dogmas’ of the Catholic Church. ‘If a Pope has a disagreement with a cardinal he just moves him, it’s easy,’ he said with a chuckle.
Rees-Mogg said his faith stems from the Resurrection.
‘If you believe Christ died on the
I If the Pope c clashes with a cardinal, he just moves him
cross and rose again on the third day, there’s no miracle greater than that. If that is true, it’s easy to believe the rest of the Church’s teaching. If it’s not, everything else is a waste of time.’ How could he be so sure? ‘Because St Peter was willing to be martyred, crucified upside down, because he had seen the Resurrection.’ But the men who blew up the Twin Towers and the London Underground claimed to be martyrs too.
‘They weren’t martyrs, they were evil, delusional mass murderers,’ he said. This time there was no Bertie Woosterish smile playing on his lips. Rees-Mogg’s strict Catholic orthodoxy caused controversy when he said he opposed all abortion, including for rape victims.
Shortly before our interview, a friend of the MP suggested privately that Rees-Mogg also believes in another Catholic tenet – that there should be no sex before marriage. He duly confirmed he and Helena did not live together before they married in 2007, when he was aged 38. However, when pressed further, Rees- Mogg rebuffed us with a firm: ‘I am not discussing private and intimate matters.’
He is uneasy about some aspects of the transgender rights debate.
‘ If you have people who have no intention of changing sex but think it would be fun to go into the women’s changing room, we cannot ignore that.’
And he takes issue with Guardian pundit Suzanne Moore, who called him a ‘semi fascist in tweed’.
‘I’m very far from being a fascist,’ he said, with the same Zenlike calm he displayed when he refused to be intimidated by Leftwing thugs at a meeting at a university in Bristol last month.
‘I’m not some hard-nosed Rightwing authoritarian,’ he said. ‘I’m against corporal and capital punishment. I believe in giving people sent to prison a second chance.’
Mrs May was mocked for saying the naughtiest thing she had done was to run through a wheat field. Rees-Mogg, who owns two classic Bentleys as well as the Jag (he calls it his ‘ day car’), nervously confessed he once drove at 100mph on a British motorway without getting caught – ‘ this is dangerous territory, one doesn’t want to show off or be a total wuss’ – and has had ‘two or three’ speeding fines.
He has never used the F-word –‘at least not as an adult’ – and has ‘never drunk so much that I can’t remember what happened the night before’.
Rees- Mogg compares Brexit to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the birth of modern parliamentary sovereignty. It i s an interesting parallel. The Glorious Revolution al so saw Catholic James II thrown out, the Crown given to Protestant William of Orange from the European mainland, partly to boost trade (sound familiar?), and Catholics banned from becoming the monarch.
Rees-Mogg has tried to reassure non- believers alarmed by his deeply held religious convictions on issues like abortion and rape, saying they would not affect his policies if he ever got into power.
However, there could be an exception. His fierce Catholic pride was hurt when the ban on the monarch’s female offspring having equal rights to succeed to the throne was lifted in 2013, while his call for the ban on Catholics to be lifted was rejected.
‘It was unfriendly to the Catholic Church to say women must not be discriminated against but it’s fine that Catholics are. It should have been updated for everyone.’
It could lead to an interesting conversation in his first audience with the Queen – the Head of the Church of England – if Rees-Mogg ever inherits Mrs May’s Tory crown.
Bombers are not martyrs – they are evil murderers