‘I’ve made no pretence to be a modern man at all, ever,” Jacob Rees-Mogg told his mate Nigel Farage last week. “I’m probably as modern as you.”
With glimpses of genuinely old worlde accessories – six kids, Burke’s-listed wife, Grade II-listed manor, vintage cars, etc – increasingly available on his Twitter and Instagram accounts, along with a full media schedule always undertaken in immaculate old-fashioned clothing, Rees-Mogg’s committed aversion to most forms of progress has duly earned the respect of backward-leaning Conservative MPs and party members. Some 6% of the latter want him as Theresa May’s replacement.
True, many more of Rees-Mogg’s colleagues still favour his principal rival for the restoration of Etonian rule, Boris Johnson. However, growing public distaste for the inadequacy and rudeness of the latter leaves a vacancy for a fresh Conservative swell with enough absurd affectations to decontaminate, for appearances’ sake, an adequately crass outlook, especially on Brexit.
That it should so quickly be filled is chiefly a credit to Rees-Mogg’s nanny, always a key part of his act. It is also a rebuke to those of us who believed that even if history did, by remote chance, throw up a successor to Johnson, with similar credentials in Latin-ornamented exhibitionism, then recent disappointments in the Etonian department, along with some vestigial responsibility in the Conservative party, would be enough to protect the public from this particular form of harm. Though if there really were another wealthy Have I Got News for You alumnus out there with a preposterous voice, novelty hair and an ancestry-worshipping habit, would not a public that has heard Johnson grunt “get stuffed” and “go whistle” prove immune to this sort of temptation?
On the contrary. Tories, dazzled by Rees-Mogg’s double-breasted suits and inexhaustible store of irrelevant historical allusions, can justifiably argue that they’re promoting a clothes horse with wide, cross-party support. In the same week that Rees-Mogg composed a first tweet in Latin, bantered with Farage and completed his relentless promotional work, he found time for tea – we learn from Instagram – with Labour’s Jess Phillips, whose own popularity has already done much to support his claim to being “a man of the people, vox populi vox dei”.
“I might not agree with the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg on policy,” Phillips writes, “but he is no identikit politician – he is always completely authentic.” Only Rees-Mogg, it’s true, can conceivably have devised that signature drawl, quite unlike his schoolfellows’, or his sister’s, when she, too, campaigned for a seat. Maybe his arresting social media entry, building on Johnson’s existing achievements in showing off, should encourage more truly authentic politicians likewise to prioritise presentation over persuasion when building political alliances.
Johnson could offer, in addition to his shagging, various genuinely metropolitan elite attitudes as a token of 21st-century intent. Rees-Mogg, disabled by deep piety from making similar gestures, has established meticulous posing as his passport to circles that might normally be expected to recoil from his views on, say, same-sex marriage (against), safety regulations (bin), Trump (kewl!), Obama (boo) climate change (wot?). Unless something goes very wrong before next June, the organisers of Glastonbury could well face a struggle between long-held principle and an audience passion for authenticity that cries out for Mogg setting out, say, the Christian case against sheltering more child refugees.
Though it comes too late for colleagues such as Edward Leigh, with whom Mogg shares so many authentically intolerant attitudes, his soaring reputation on social media is instructive to any other devout MPs keen to have their harsher orthodoxies overlooked by the Love Island generation. Merely the invention of a nanny, if Mogg’s droll invocations are any guide, might help fellow dogmatists reinvent prejudice as honesty, schoolboy pedantry as erudition, homophobia as the expression of something deeply British. Mogg, also a Trump supporter, was recently hailed by an awed National Student magazine as a not just a “nice man” with a super big vocabulary, but a “cultural icon”.
“He loves the fact,” his admirer writes, “that he’s traditional, but he’s a rebel, too – and in the same way he has a certain swagger about him despite being rather mild mannered and humble.” Quite right: one notable rebellion was against reforming the House of Lords. As for swagger: his celebrated politeness is never more missed than when Mogg himself chooses to vary it with nose-thumbing about, say, “the yoke of Brussels” or his trademark condescension.
Interviewed by Jon Snow about the “shambles” of May’s election, he opted, in what was widely advertised as a hilarious Mogg classic, for a routine about Snow’s non-archaic use of the word. “You say that it is a butcher’s slaughterhouse,” he said. “That’s what a shambles means. I’m surprised you don’t know.”
Of all the compliments showered upon Rees-Mogg, however, perhaps the most useful for his continued ascent is his alleged similarity to PG Wodehouse’s Bertram Wooster. Certainly, the comparison never harmed Boris Johnson, until he was recategorised by Eddie Mair as “a nasty piece of work”. Rather, the Wodehouse/Wooster descriptor immediately places its subject as the finest kind of blundering Englishman, everything that is delightfully likely, as demonstrated by the new Rees-Mogg memes, to overcome scepticism that might otherwise be directed at, say, a preachy pro-Brexit MP/investment banker who acts, at the age of 48, like one of the more conceited contestants on Child Genius. Whatever the child-rearing methods that led to this behaviour, it may be no bad thing that the Rees-Mogg nanny will never, given her employer’s commitment to populating Somerset, have to seek work elsewhere.
Leave aside the misreading of the dim and harmless Wooster (who relies on Jeeves for archaic word definitions), it is still hard to think of anything less traditionally English than a Wooster who, like Rees-Mogg, dotes on Farage, or of a Wooster who, like Rees-Mogg, calls himself “a man of the people”. An important scene in the The Code of the Woosters, when Bertram confronts local demagogue Roderick Spode, puts the record straight on both counts. “The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting ‘Heil Spode!’, and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags!’”
Admittedly, Rees-Mogg’s signature line in swanking has been alarmingly successful. Maybe it could even, come an election, cancel out a voting record that encapsulates – from his laissez-faire on obesity to his interventions in support of the Murdochs – everything that is ugliest and most boneheaded about his party. But that’s a lot, his supporters might want to reflect, to ask of a drawl and a suit.
