Rock music loving wife is MUCH posher than he is!

FIVE months before David Cameron became Tory leader in 2005, it was reported that Rees-Mogg’s sister Annunziata was desperate to tackle her sibling’s ‘image problem’, fearing his fogeyish outfits would stop him becoming an MP – and finding a wife.

While the idea of Annunziata’s wish to subject Rees-Mogg to a makeover was almost certainly fanciful, she did succeed in persuading him to stop wearing glasses temporarily. But far more significantly, she introduced him that summer to wealthy heiress Helena de Chair at an anti-EU event. Within weeks they had started going out, being careful to keep their relationship quiet.

Helena’s background is both aristocratic and exotic. Her grandfather was once the lover of John F. Kennedy’s sister Kathleen, while the first of her mother Lady Juliet Tadgell’s three husbands was the playboy 6th Marquess of Bristol, who had been jailed for a Mayfair jewellery theft in the 1930s.

The romance between Jacob and Helena developed quickly. He asked her to marry him one weekend in April 2006 at her mother’s home – Bourne Park in Kent – choosing as the venue for his proposal the house’s picture gallery, which contains a series of Van Dyck paintings.

‘Jacob told me he knew Helena was the right one when he first saw the Van Dyck portrait of Sir Thomas Wentworth, the 1st Earl of Stafford, who is considered an English Catholic martyr, hanging in the family picture gallery in Bourne Park,’ says his friend Glenys Roberts. ‘Jacob told me he dropped to his knees and proposed then and there.’

That Helena is not Catholic but a member of the Church of England came as a surprise to Rees-Mogg’s friends, who had been under the impression he would never be willing to marry outside his denomination. Others were equally caught off-guard when they discovered that Helena, a chemistry graduate from Bristol University who has an interest in hard rock music, wore a silver tongue stud up until her marriage.

But Rees-Mogg did not exactly go out of his way to share with even his closest friends any notion that he was dating Helena.

‘He kept Helena slightly under wraps,’ says his close friend and former flatmate Simon Hoare. ‘I remember I was driving back from a meeting and he called me and said, “I’m just calling to let you know I’ve got engaged.” And I said, “Oh right. I didn’t even know you were going out with anybody.” And I think he said, “Neither did my mother.”’

All are united, though, in their praise for Helena, describing her as ‘the ultimate supportive political wife’. One notes that she has also forced Rees-Mogg to drop some of his old-fashioned habits, including asking female guests to leave the dining room after eating while the men remain to drink brandy.

After the couple’s wedding at Canterbury Cathedral, some of it conducted in Latin, 650 guests were invited to a reception at Bourne Park. They included the future Tory MP Louise Bagshawe but the guest list was not restricted solely to Rees-Mogg’s closest friends. One attendee says he sat next to his postman.