Jacob Rees-Mogg’s new reality show may sound as appealing as flushing your entire head down a toilet. Yet Meet the Rees-Moggs (on Discovery+) is such a bewildering piece of television that it may well come up in conversation over the next few weeks. If that’s the case, here’s a handy bluffer’s guide to just how weird the former Tory MP and his family are.
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Somerset home is covered with portraits of Jacob Rees-Mogg. It is so heavily plastered with pictures of him that you will soon lose count. There’s a painting of him as an adolescent. There’s a painting of him mimicking Aaron Shikler’s John F Kennedy portrait. There’s a painting of him standing in front of another painting, which is quite Inception-y of him. The best one, though, is a painting of him that one of his six children is forced to stare at during trumpet practice.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is a Greggs nut. Apparently, he says, he buys a ham and cheese baguette and a chocolate eclair for his lunch every day. He says this, however, during the election campaign and then never mentions it again after he loses his seat, so maybe it is simply a wrongheaded attempt to pander to the electorate.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is a picky eater. Perhaps the Greggs infatuation is down to his bizarre eating habits. He doesn’t like yellow food, for example, and a member of his household staff points out: “He isn’t a fan of vegetables or onions or anything like that.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg describes the same member of staff, a man named Shaun, as someone who “does everything that needs to be done in a busy household”. This includes “making our cider and looking after the Bentley”. His duties also appear to include scrubbing the words “posh twat” off election campaign posters and, in one instance, doing the “wanker” sign at a portrait of Robert Peel.
Jacob Rees-Mogg sleeps completely still. As if he was in a tomb, he says. Chilling.
Jacob Rees-Mogg quotes his election concession speech all the time. When he lost his seat this year, he quoted Chitty Chitty Bang Bang by saying: “From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success.” He also uses this exact phrase when his dog eats one of his daughter’s sausages off the floor.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is sent into apoplexy by the notion of commuting badgers. During his post-election doldrums, and inspired by his daughter’s desire to emulate Carrie Johnson, he briefly entertains the idea of digging a duck pond in his garden. When the planning permission report points out that the pond might disrupt the path of commuting badgers, he throws a little tantrum and gives up.
Jacob Rees-Mogg does not pack his own suitcases.
Jacob Rees-Mogg has a private chapel. It contains some of his most prized possessions: a fragment of the true cross, a fragment of the crown of thorns and a piece of Thomas More’s hair shirt. It is illegal to buy and sell this sort of item, he says, but not necessarily illegal to buy and sell the containers that they happen to come in. What an unexpected wheeler dealer.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is capable of emotion. But only briefly and only if you look hard enough. He doesn’t flinch when he loses his seat, nor does he flinch when the promise of becoming Conservative party chairman is snatched from him at the last minute. But when he Facetimes his daughter shortly after she has been sent to boarding school – something he struggled to adapt to as a child and she clearly isn’t thrilled about either – he very briefly clams up in a very repressed, English, privately educated way. Maybe, buried deep beneath the multiple self-parodic layers he’s constructed around himself, he does actually have a heart.
Jacob Rees-Mogg makes his children dress in black tie for dinner on Saturday nights.
