Keen for a shake-up? Try Jacob

Mogg can be a Jez-buster

THE world is drunk on democracy. And in the land of the legless, the one-legged man is king.

Which is why politicians with obvious handicaps are now ruling the roost.

Donald Trump may be more liability than disability but he’s still the most powerful man on the planet, God help us.

Emmanuel Macron started without so much as a political party to his name and now he’s president of France.

And Jeremy Corbyn was never a shadow minister, let alone a government minister, yet he’s become the unassailable leader of the Labour Party.

Voters the world over got tanked up down the Democracy Arms, wobbled to polling stations, and backed the most unlikely candidates for high office to cock a snook at the established order.

Now comes the hangover – the Brexit headache and that sick feeling whenever Trump tweets.

When I heard while on holiday abroad that backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg was being touted as Tory leader my first thought was someone was pulling my leg.

Surely not the same Jacob with a liking for double-breasted pyjamas and using words like floccinaucinihilipilification in parliamentary debate. Not the Jacob who took his nanny canvassing yet deplores the nanny state.

Nor the Jacob who called his latest son Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher after three popes and a saint. Or that could be 15 popes if you count all the pontiffs with those names – nine Bonifaces, five Sixtuses, and a Chris.

Then I thought, why not?

I can think of worse prime ministers – Theresa May for one.

The Mogg is amusing company and a shrewd cookie with a backbone of old-fashioned decency.

Which is why MPs of all parties are fond of him.

I may not like his stand on Brexit or his choice of children’s names but nor can I help liking him.

Not for a moment did I see him as a future Tory leader and PM.

But then last year Corbers didn’t seem like a PM either and he damn near was.

Despite the jokes about Jacob being MP for the 18th century he might be just what the Tory Party needs.

A one Moggaton bomb under it. BOJO and JoJo may sound like chimps in a zoo but one runs the Foreign Office and the other is universities minister.

A wide spectrum of responsibilities, then, for Johnson brothers Boris and Jo.

Now JoJo has explained why Labour can’t refund uni tuition fees because it would cost £11billion.

And it would put up uni funding by £6.5billion.

That’s the equivalent of building 580 new secondary schools. Or to put it another way, firing 760,000 teachers. Which would be tricky because there are only 440,000 of them as it is.

I’ve always been against charging tuition fees. But the grim reality is that it’s too late for a refund now.