Moveover Jacob– it’s MY turn to be top Mogg
They’re so posh, they even battled over who inherited the family nanny. Now Annunziata Rees-Mogg (don’t call her Nancy!) has defected to Farage — and in this uproarious encounter, she declares . . .
Here she is now, just what the world has been waiting for, another member of the reesMogg dynasty ready to drop anchor in the mainstream of British political life.
‘Hello, how nice to meet you,’ says Annunziata rees-Mogg, sister of Jacob rees-Mogg, daughter of Lord rees-Mogg but ‘person in my own right’.
Annunziata (‘that’s with a Z in the Italian manner, not with a C, which is Spanish’) has forgotten that we once worked together on another newspaper and indeed sat next to each other, side by side in our little news pod, for months.
I remember that she would whisk in with her Pocahontas plait and long, waxed coat after a weekend of riding at her Somerset home, smelling lightly of horse and strongly of privilege.
Today, the 40-year-old mother-of-two barely looks a day older, even though she once considered Botox, but the cosmetologist told her to forget it, as it was ‘already too late’. Nice!
Now we meet again, washed up on the tarry shore of these turbulent political times.
For despite being a card-carrying member of the Conservative party since she was five, and embarking on two failed attempts to find a Tory seat, Annunziata has ripped up her membership card and teamed up with the likes of Ann Widdecombe and former communist Claire Fox to stand for Nigel Farage’s newly-launched Brexit Party.
‘We are a very eclectic group of people,’ she concedes. ‘I mean, Claire Fox and I probably don’t agree on any issues other than Brexit and democracy, but right now those are the two that matter.’
Following a lifetime of true blue devotion, she felt she could no longer support Mrs May after watching her bungle Brexit and enter negotiations with the enemy — Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
‘Mrs May has her head in the sand. What was once seen as resilience is now seen as ignorance of her own party’s feelings. There is speculation that she doesn’t read newspapers, she doesn’t listen to any negative comments, she doesn’t see that her party is in revolt.’
SHE
explains: ‘Look at Ann Widdecombe, a member for 55 years who thought she would never leave. Yet Theresa has pushed her out just as she has pushed me out. She is ruining it, ruining it. She is destroying her party, and that is a tragedy.’
Annunziata had a visitation recently when driving to Lincolnshire, where she lives with her businessman husband Matthew Glanville and their daughters Isadora, eight, and Molly, one. Passing under a bridge upon which someone had spray-painted ‘ Don’t Vote, Act’, her rich Moggian blood stirred in her blue Moggian veins. It was a sign! A calling for sure. Some might have gone home and tidied the laundry basket — Annunziata joined the Brexit Party.
‘I want to deliver democracy,’ she says today. ‘I am prepared to give up a lot to do it.’
As befits her status as a candidate for the Brexit Party in a huge Midlands constituency that takes in six counties, she seems to have developed a serious, sonorous way of talking I don’t recall before.
It makes everything she says sound desperately important, whether it be about the threat to democracy (‘ I don’t want to damage the Conservative party, but they are not just ignoring their membership on Brexit, but the electorate, too’) or how the infamous nanny to the rees-Mogg family, the woman who accompanied Jacob when he canvassed in Scotland during the 1997 election, taught her how to bake cakes.
‘ I love my nanny. She very importantly taught me to make cakes and that is a life skill no one should be without. She taught me how to bake fairy cakes, as we callthem. Victoria sponges, too. Some with lemon icing, some with strawberry and cream fillings, but a good basic cake. I never really liked chocolate cake, so she didn’t teach me how to do that.’ Where were we? Oh yes. Today, Annunziata is fresh from an interview with Sky television in their Westminster studio, wrapped in one of her usual pashminas, her china blue eyes agleam with good intent. She doesn’t even mind that
Sky asked her a lot of questions about her brother.
‘Unfortunately, Jacob is better known than I am at the moment. I hope to change that.’
Indeed. Big bro is ‘sad’ that she has left the Conservatives. Did he try to persuade her to stay?
‘No. He knew my decision-making had gone beyond a point where there was any point trying to dissuade me. I’m sure he would have done, if he thought I hadn’t made up my mind.’ It is a sign of these incredible times that it is someone like Annunziata reesMogg who is speaking for ordinary Brexit voters.
After all, she is the privately educated scion of a grand Catholic family, a woman so posh her diamond-cluster engagement ring wasn’t purchased in a shop, but is a Georgian family heirloom.
When she stood as a prospective parliamentary candidate in Frome, Somerset, in 2006, David Cameron asked her to shorten her name to the more socially inclusive Nancy (she refused), and she once posed as a ‘Tory Tatler Toff’ in a glossy magazine. ‘That was a mistake. It is not who I am,’ she says now.
Street cred qualifications include a £3.13 an hour job as a barmaid in St James’s in central London. It hardly makes her the Little Match Girl, but what’s important is not where you’ve been, but where you’re going, right?
‘right,’ she says. ‘My life has had its ups and downs, like anyone else’s. And if I can use my lucky position to be a voice for people who can’t shout as loudly as I can, that’s what I’m here for.’
She is the political opposite of rachel Johnson, another sister taking on her better-known sibling in the great Brexit divide.
While brother Boris is an arch Brexiteer, rachel has joined the Brexit-opposing Change UK party, set up by The Independent Group of MPs, and will stand for the european elections in the south west.
Despite their dynastic
I love my nanny. She taught me how to bake cakes...a life skill everyone should have
similarities, the Moggs and the Johnsons don’t know each other, which is a surprise. One imagines them drinking lashings of lemonade and eating cream buns while they plot to intermarry and overthrow the world, but not a bit of it. And if Annunziata ReesMogg doesn’t like talking about her brother very much, she likes even less talking about the Johnson clan. Come on, I say, you must think about her a little bit. She is a rival! ‘Nope.’ Like if you could beat her at tennis or not. ‘ No, no. She is very good at tennis.’ Could you ride a horse faster? ‘I don’t know if she rides at all.’ Could you beat her at cribbage? ‘I’ve never played it although I have seen a cribbage set.’ Scrabble? ‘I bet I would beat her at Scrabble.’ And bake a better fairy cake? ‘Yes! Because I have Nanny’s recipe.’ Would you ever go on a reality TV show like she did? ‘No. Because I quite like privacy.’ Indeed. For a nascent politician, a surprising number of subjects are off limits with Annunziata, including her husband (‘I’m just not talking about him’) and her Catholic faith.
Is she, for example, as hardline as Jacob on the subject of abortion? ‘I don’t think that has any effect on whether we leave the European Union, which is what I’m fighting for.’
Fair enough, but the electorate are entitled to know who they are voting for, even if she worries about the effect on her young family. ‘I do not want my daughters reading vile comments online about their mother,’ she says. ‘I just do not want that.’
She mentions a cartoon recently published in this newspaper, which ‘ caricatured me as this scowling person’. Did that bother her? Certainly enough to mention it.
‘No, because I used to watch my dad’s puppet on Spitting Image.
‘It was very funny, even though they caricatured him as a man with a very bad lisp, which was a little hurtful. But we are a family who like to tease each other a lot.’
She grew up in a series of grand houses in Somerset, the youngest of the five Rees-Moggs. Jacob was ‘an absolutely fantastic brother’ who always included her when his friends had sleepovers. He taught her to play cricket and she loved long country walks and horses.
When Jacob learned to drive, he took her to Alton Towers, an unimaginable treat. ‘He is really kind and thoughtful,’ says Annunziata.
There was a family issue when Jacob had children and ‘stole’ Nanny. ‘Like Jacob, I adore my nanny. She is the most wonderful, caring person.
‘Jacob had children before me but he did lend her to me when my first daughter was born. She helped me settle in for a week or so. It was a very comforting present.’
Annunziata eschewed university and instead went to work for a few years, including at The Times newspaper.
‘They asked me to stay on,’ she recalls. How did she get that position? ‘Well, my father was the editor there. It was the luck of having a good connection, you see.’
Good connections also paved the way for an internship in fund management, a ‘bit of publishing’ and a stint at The Daily Telegraph which is where we originally met.
Not many people, I venture, have those kinds of golden opportunities.
‘Well I’m not going to deny who I am. My father was a wonderful man, but he was also a very successful one who ended up in the Lords.
‘I did go to private school. I’m not the type of person who is going to pretend to be something I am not, but what I am going to do is use the luck. I’m never going to deny that knowing people is helpful. However, that is changing in society and I am glad, because I totally believe in a meritocracy.’
I nearly take a bite out of my coffee cup in surprise. You do?
‘I think the best people should have the jobs — regardless of who I know or what levers they might be able to pull.’
REALLY?
‘ It is already happening. A lot of big companies have an absolute ban on giving work experience to friends’ or colleagues’ children and that is a step in the right direction.’
It is? What would have happened to her, if this meritocratic utopia had been in place when she was younger?
‘Well, I just would have applied for jobs, like everyone else. And I probably would have had to go to university.’
That’s the thing about privileged people. They never quite understand the bottomless depth of their privilege, how it isolates them from the grind, uncertainty and worry of life. Yet there is no reason to be chippy and a great deal to admire about this woman.
For here is Annunziata Rees-Mogg, stowing her comfortable existence in the overhead locker as she jumps aboard the Brexit Party’s inaugural flight. She didn’t have to do this — she wasn’t a bored housewife aching for something to do.
She still has pangs about leaving her girls, and will take the baby with her to Brussels if it comes to that.
‘There are never enough hours in the day to be with my family, but I felt I had to do something.
‘So I’m giving up an awful lot of time with my children, which I regret because I loved having my mother and my nanny around when I was young.’
In Lincolnshire, she has a ‘mother’s helper for a few hours a week’ and Nanny still helps out from time to time (her children are with her today) but she is leaving the home front because she believes it is important ‘ for daughters to know that their mothers can make a difference’.
And she is striking out, not as a daughter of a peer or a sister of an MP, but as herself.
‘One of the problems is not what women can or should do. It’s how it is reported. Rachel Johnson is not just Boris’s sister. She is a perfectly competent and successful woman in her own right, as am I. If we are always seen as ‘wife of’, ‘sister of’, then people dismiss us, don’t they?’
Not any more, sis.