Critics tear apart Jacob Rees-Mogg’s new book

Adoring colleagues on the right of the Conservative party hang on to Jacob Rees-Mogg’s every word in the House of Commons, considering him one of Brexit’s foremost rhetoricians.

But after the release of his new book about eminent Victorians, the literary world has begged

to differ, with critics gleefully mauling it as “staggeringly silly” and “absolutely abysmal”.

The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain, published this week to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s birth, features figures including the former prime ministers Robert Peel, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

Rees-Mogg, the MP for North East Somerset and chair of the European Research Group (ERG), reportedly spent about 300 hours writing the work, for which he has so far received £12,500 from Penguin Random House.

But its early readers have not been persuaded that the project was time well spent. The historian A N Wilson, whose book The Victorians was published in 2002, wrote in the Times that ReesMogg’s effort was “anathema to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply common, sense”.

Describing the work as “a dozen clumsily written pompous schoolboy compositions”, he said it claimed to be a work of history, but was in fact “yet another bit of self-promotion by a highly motivated modern politician”.

On the chapter about Gen Charles Napier’s conquest of Sindh, Wilson wrote: “At this point in the book you start to think that the author is worse than a twit. By all means let us celebrate what was great about the Victorians, but there is something morally repellent about a book that can gloss over massacres and pillage on the scale perpetrated by Napier.”

Writing in the Guardian, Kathryn Hughes described the book as “an origin myth for Rees-Mogg’s particular rightwing vision of Britain”.

“In parliament, Rees-Mogg is often referred to as ‘the honourable member for the 18th century’, a nod to those funny clothes he wears, along with pretending not to know the name of any modern pop songs,” she wrote.

“What a shame, then, that he has not absorbed any of the intellectual and creative elegance that flourished during that period.” She criticised the lack of women in the book. “The only female who appears in the book is Queen Victoria herself who, Rees-Mogg assures us, ‘became no less of a woman when she learned to rely upon Albert as a partner and to trust him’.”

Dominic Sandbrook described the book as abysmal and souldestroying. Writing in the Sunday Times, he said: “No doubt every sanctimonious academic in the country has already decided that Rees-Mogg’s book has to be dreadful, so it would have been fun to disappoint them.

“But there is just no denying it: the book is terrible, so bad, so boring, so mind-bogglingly banal that if it had been written by anybody else it would never have been published.”