'It will follow him for years': how Jacob ReesMogg's slouch gambit backfired
In a week filled with memorable political images – Boris Johnson’s sideways glance at a fainting police officer, Sir Nicholas Soames blinking back tears after he was expelled from the Conservative party, or former minister Dr Phillip Lee unexpectedly crossing the floor of the House of Commons to join the Lib
Dems – it was the image of a nearhorizontal Jacob Rees-Mogg lounging across the front bench that lit up the internet.
As a tense emergency debate which would affect the livelihoods of millions of people continued around him, the newly appointed leader of the house leaned back and stretched his legs across several seats, his left hand lolled across a besuited midriff. With MPs agonising over the gravity of the current political crisis, the member for Somerset North East nonchalantly closed his eyes and rested.
For some MPs in the chamber on Tuesday night, it was the moment the man nicknamed “the honourable member for the 18th century” lost any remaining anachronistic charm.
Rees-Mogg had gained a reputation among some parliamentarians and the public as a winning curiosity. His politeness, deft use of parliamentary procedure and precise pronunciation of 29-letter words like floccinaucinihilipilification won over those who disliked his populist politics. During appearances on the BBC’s Have I Got News For You and several magazine programmes, he is asked about his decision to campaign during an election alongside his nanny or to name his sixth child Sixtus.
But his nonchalant posture enraged MPs on the opposition benches as they debated a plan to shut down parliament amid warnings of a wrecked economy and medicine shortages. Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP for Brighton Pavilion, had watched Rees-Mogg slouching for at least an hour before she finally took him task.
“The leader of the house has been spread across three seats, lying out as if that was something very boring for him
to listen to tonight,” she said.
Other MPs shouted “Sit up!” and “Sit up straight!”
Looking both embarrassed and defiant, Rees-Mogg shook his head, before adjusting his glasses.
But by this point, social media users across the globe who were watching the debate had begun to respond with dozens of creative memes.
His posture was used to trace the decline of the government’s majority from 17 to minus 43 or the rapid fall in value of the pound against the euro since 2016.
The reclining Rees-Mogg was superimposed dancing with the 1980s ska band Madness, high-jumping the Fosbury flop and dropped on to the sofas of The Simpsons and Friends – renamed “No Friends”.
Those of an artistic bent compared his pose to Jacques-Louis David’s the Death of Marat, Sir John Everett Millais’ Ophelia and a sprawling upper class gentleman in Thomas Dugdale’s Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers in London.
Lucas said the public response to his unusual parliamentary pose has been magnified by the importance of the debate.
“It does demonstrate an extraordinary confidence and a sense of entitlement if you literally take up far more social space than anyone else, and that manifested itself in looking so contemptuous of everyone else. I think he has suddenly learnt that what you can get away with on the backbench you cannot do on the frontbench. This is an image that is going to follow him for many years to come,” she said.
His performances at the dispatch box – he was accused of being dismissive of questions posed by remain-supporting colleagues – enraged some of the 21 Tory MPs who voted against the government that night.
Soames told the Guardian: “Jacob Rees-Mogg’s performance, his rudeness and casualness to colleagues, shows he just doesn’t understand the way it works ... it was just bloody bad behaviour, you wouldn’t see Andrea Leadsom lying about.”
Chris Bryant, the Labour MP for Rhondda and former deputy leader of the house of Commons, said ReesMogg’s performance in the house has failed to take into consideration the government’s weak position. “The thing about the leader of the house job, is you have to do it with a great deal of grace, especially when it’s a minority government. Leaders with pointy elbows don’t tend to get much done,” he said.
Rees-Mogg’s week went from bad to worse on Thursday when he compared a consultant who helped draw up no-deal medical plans to the disgraced anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield. Rees-Mogg eventually apologised following pressure from Westminster colleagues and the chief medical officer of England, who said that the leader of the house’s comments about the respected neurologist David Nicholl were “disrespectful”.
Rees-Mogg was elected to the Commons in 2010, but his profile rose considerably in the wake of the 2016 Brexit referendum when his calm performances in front of TV cameras led him to being seen as a possible future prime minister. Queues for his speeches at party conference snaked round buildings, and Moggmentum, an online conservative campaign and grassroots movement supporting him was created.
The son of the former Times editor William Rees-Mogg, he dismissed questions last year about investment funds established in Ireland by Somerset Capital Management, a firm he co-founded. SCM had warned investors about the dangers of a hard Brexit as Rees-Mogg spoke out about “scare stories from project fear”.
He has also refused to bow to mainstream views on abortion, which he opposes even in cases of rape.
But Andrew Bridgen, the Eurosceptic MP and a close colleague of ReesMogg, said his difficult week should not detract from his talents.
“It is clear that the opposition see him as a very capable and able leader of the house. They clearly want to get some hits on him because they see him as a threat in what has been a very bad week for the party.
“Jacob was the darling of the Labour party when he was attacking May or Cameron. Now that Euroscepticism is mainstream he is the enemy. There is no politician I have met who is consistently more polite than Jacob.”