Shock horror! An MP who says what he believes Impervious to fashion, Jacob Rees-Mogg wore a suit to visit his sixth baby – named Sixtus. But says QUENTIN LETTS, The Mogg’s actually a very cool cat
WELCOME and good health — no, let that be ‘salve et bene tibi!’ — to Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher Rees-Mogg. Sixtus has just been born to Helena Rees-Mogg and her husband, Tory MP Jacob.
As Latin scholars will deduce from his name, Sixtus is the sixth and latest of their offspring. Bookies might not bet against a Septimus, mind you.
As one of life’s Quentins (the name’s a derivation of Quintus, meaning the fifth child), I doff my topper to the lad and to his parents. When Whitehall economists upbraid us British for our productivity rates, they plainly do not mean the fertile Rees-Moggs.
While the infant Sixtus settles himself into this vale of tears and while, we must hope, his mother takes some well-earned rest, it seems a fair moment to tug the horn in salute to the new arrival’s father.
Sixtus will soon discover that his dad is not as other mortals. Just look at that photograph of him in the maternity hospital yesterday. Other fathers tend to look ill-shaven and scruffy. Jacob?
Neatly attired in collar, tie and doublebreasted suit. And quite right, too. Anything less would somehow have shaken our faith in one of the most single-mindedly fashion- resistant politicians in our Parliament.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is so much his own man — and seems such a cultural throwback to earlier times — that he has rightly become a pin-up of the internet age.
Is it really only seven years since he became an MP? He seems to have been around much longer. But they probably said that when he was a little boy in shorts, and we can be sure the shorts were properly tailored. I have never seen him without tie and dark suit, tidily buttoned. His pukka voice creaks like his laced, black Oxford shoes, polished, but not to a vulgar sheen.
HEWAS born at the end of the Sixties, a decade that was anathema to his whole body. Which makes him 48. Others say he behaves like a man of 80, or 180.
When he arrived at Westminster, some treated him like a joke. He soon put them right on that. Not in a high-handed or touchy way — he is remarkably unpompous — but by being gentlemanly yet clinically firm in debate.
His impeccable debating style has helped him become a talisman of the courteous pro-Brexit Right.
Amid all the screaming neuralgia of Westminster in recent weeks, all the bitterness and finger-stabbing and peacocking and chest-puffing, the false claims of venomously vengeful Osbornian Remainers, the crestfallen smiles of Blairites, the Soviet fist- clenching of Corbynistas, the cack-handed ‘oopsies’ of those bozos in Tory Central Office, Rees- Mogg remained supremely laid-back.
Literally so. In the House of Commons he has reclined in his customary place at the end of the Chamber, viewing the world from an angle of roughly 65 degrees.
He leans low on the green leather bench like a man pedalling while sitting back on one of those recumbent bicycles. He folds his hands over his navel and declines to become caught in all the hullabaloo.
In the middle of the storm the Mogg has watched, the coolest cat in politics cogitating. No doubt he is much the same at home when his newly- enlarged fleet of children is kicking up a merry din.
There is something ageless and, counter- intuitively, something impishly modern about the Member for North EastSomerset. Maybe it is his deftly subversive humour, as seen on TV’s Have I Got News For You.
When ITV’s Sunday morning politics show tried to put on a mocking show of patriotism the other morning (in response to complaints that broadcasters have been betraying the country with their Brexit coverage), it filled its studio with Union Jack bunting, bacon sandwiches and boiled eggs in their cups.
Ho ho ho. But Rees-Mogg, simply by sitting there with his oldfashioned spectacles and buttoned- up suit and monastic vowels, did a great deal more to radiate a sense of Britishness. He also radiates authenticity. If there is one over-riding lesson from recent British politics, one not yet comprehended by the Gadarene swine of our absurd and hyperventilating commentariat, it is that the electorate is heartily sick of the professional political class, who go into public service for a career and an income
What we crave above all else is politicians who are true to themselves and know what they think. Forthright clarity, please. We have had quite enough of patronising careerists and flim-flam artistes.
His constituents certainly seem to approve of Jacob Rees-Mogg. In the General Election he scored some 53 per cent of the vote, securing a 10,235 majority in territory once occupied by New Labour.
Did you see those photographs of him and one of his older sons on the campaign trail? The boy, about eight, was as smartly-suited as his dad and almost dwarfed by an enormous blue rosette. Son and father came across a tattoo parlour which had stuck a rude Vote Labour poster in its front window. The Rees-Moggs reacted with dry aplomb. On Instagram Jacob shared a photograph of the two of them in front of that tattoo shop, alongside the caption: ‘We shall have to take our business elsewhere.’
Then there was his recent remark to Mail diarist Sebastian Shakespeare. Jacob said he had been stunned, during the election campaign, to learn that Theresa May once ran through a wheat field (she said it was the naughtiest thing she ever did). ‘I think Mrs May is a model of perfection,’ said Rees-Mogg in his delicious drawl.
‘My behaviour at school was considerably worse than running through a field of wheat. I was sent out of class twice at Eton: once for wearing a Conservative rosette during the 1983 General Election and once, during my A-levels, over an argument over a question of papal infallibility.’
A visiting Martian, reading such comments, might be amazed to find such a creature in our drearily demotic House of Commons. But Jacob has something the 21st- century British public very much likes — a self-teasing sense of humour. Rock-like values, too: he is loyal to Queen, country and family, charitable to the needy, wary of foreign control (he makes an exception for the Vatican).
I first came across him 28 summers ago when I was editing the City diary column of the Daily Telegraph. From time to time I would be given a young assistant — nowadays we would say intern — and one of them was Jacob, then a 20-year-old Oxford undergraduate. His father William had been editor of The Times and he wanted to see what newspapers were like. Jacob looked and
sounded and dressed and acted exactly as he does today. On his first morning we all trooped in to the City editor’s office for our editorial meeting. Jacob stood at the end of the line, watching with quiet interest as we ran through our story lines.
Finally the City editor asked Jacob if he wished to contribute anything. ‘No,’ said this bespectacled beanpole with a magisterial shake of his head, ‘except you all seem to be doing very well.’
After university he went into stockbroking and set up his own business, Somerset Capital Management. People may think he oozes inherited wealth. It is certainly true his parents were comfortably off and that the elegant Helena is from gentry stock, but Jacob is a self-made millionaire.
Behind that languid façade whirrs a top-flight City brain.
The world may see a bespoke traditionalist who motors around Chelsea in an antique Bentley; what it does not see is Rees-Mogg rising at 5am to study the markets and attend, with razor quickness, to his financial duties before the political day has begun.
In the Commons he has become the House’s best orator, able to think on his feet and throw in scholastic allusions and linguistic fireworks. He gave the Hansard stenographers a run for their money when he casually threw the word ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ into one speech.
Despite such ornate flights, his speeches are brilliantly easy to follow because he is such a clear thinker. He lays out a philosophy of enlightened Toryism marbled by constitutional radicalism.
He is socially tolerant but vigorously Eurosceptic — and no stooge of the Whips, happy occasionally to dissent from the party line.
Anyone who worries that you have to be a foaming nationalist to be a Brexiteer should listen to his thoroughly civilised Euroscepticism. He understands that Brexit will ultimately be a source of stability, saving us from national unrest as the Continent falls to pieces or becomes a federal entity.
In the past two Parliaments he also proved himself a useful member of the Treasury select commit- tee, where his City expertise came to the fore. Albeit in the most gentlemanly way, he was fiercely critical of the political shenanigans of the disgracefully pro-Remain Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney. Mr Carney may fancy himself a smooth operator but he was left looking very ordinary by the quietly deadly Rees-Mogg.
The chairman of that Treasury select committee, Andrew Tyrie, regrettably retired at the last election and Jacob Rees-Mogg is standing to succeed him. Labour MPs are reportedly plotting to stop him at any cost. Lord knows why. The City’s greedy fixers and dozy regulators and sly fraudsters would be horrified if Jacob got the job. He knows the Square Mile better than any other MP and would see through their bluster.
Mark Carney and Chancellor Philip Hammond (who still seems to be resisting Brexit), would also hate it if Rees-Mogg was elected by MPs to that position, but the rest of us would benefit greatly.
Apart from that Labour mischiefmaking, Rees-Mogg is popular across the House where he has certainly shown his early doubters wrong. When he was selected as Conservative candidate before the 2010 election there were some Cameroons who were convinced that picking so retro a figure, such a palpable Bertie Wooster (or so it seemed), would harm the Tories’ national chances.
Would the media not use him to allege that the 2010 Tories were just a bunch of remote toffs?
A few Leftwing journalists did try to mock the Mogg as an Edwardian throwback, but the public soon saw he was authentic — cheerfully, unapologetically his own person. I have never known Jacob lose his temper, denigrate an opponent personally or descend to sloganeering, except in an ironic way.
He is uninterested in focus groups and considers party members more important than spin doctors. He does not crave a junior ministerial position. If only more politicians could follow his example!
And that word ‘floccinaucinihili-pilification’? Since you ask, it means ‘considering something to be utterly useless’. Not something you could say about the magnificently productive Rees-Moggs.