People feel that politicians are just completely out of touch.” These words, spoken by Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg in his new Discovery+ fly-on-the-wall reality show, Meet the Rees-Moggs, feel... apt, shall we say. They come just after he has banged an actual gong to summon his family for dinner in their gargantuan Somerset country pile to celebrate the birthday of his youngest son, Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher Rees-Mogg (yes, really).
There are many surreal moments like this during the top-hat-wearing former Tory MP’s latest televisual vehicle. It is arguably they, rather than his controversial, outdated politics, that hold the key to understanding why he has become such an object of fascination for a nation still secretly obsessed with class.
“I think this will be a rather different kettle of fish, actually, from the Kardashians,” Jacob quips with wry amusement in the show’s intro – and he’s not wrong. While the US dynasty’s lives revolve around the bling and excess that come with being influencer royalty, Jacob, his wife Helena and their six (!) children inhabit a different social stratum entirely: that of the minted yet weirdly austere British upper crust.
It’s a world that most of us normally only encounter in fiction: the world of Saltburn, all priceless artwork yet curiously tiny tellies; the world of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, recently adapted into a marvellous Disney+ series, where installing double glazing is a cardinal sin and wearing a 30-year-old weather-beaten Barbour jacket is the real sign of wealth. It’s Dexter’s disastrous visit to his future in-laws in David Nicholls’s smash-hit One Day, where at any given moment one can fall foul of a hundred unspoken rules, and vicious parlour games see grown adults beat each other about the head with rolled up newspapers for “fun”.
Now, in Meet the Rees-Moggs, we get to glimpse this strange and unfathomable lifestyle in the flesh.
If you were ignorant before watching the show of the fact that the Rees-Moggs are properly old-school Posh with a capital “P” – and I’m not really sure how you could be, given it’s their whole brand – you certainly won’t be afterwards. Helena (full name Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair) is the daughter of the poet and aristocrat Somerset de Chair and Lady Juliet Tadgel, and the sole heir to the Fitzwilliam fortune, worth an estimated £45m in property and investment plus £80m in artwork (Jacob is said to have proposed at Lady Juliet’s country house under one of its six Van Dycks, natch).
While Jacob’s blood perhaps isn’t quite as blue, his father William Rees-Mogg (a lord) was newspaper editor of The Times and chair of the Arts Council. Jacob followed the classic Eton/Oxford trajectory that appears to be mandatory for all Tory politicians, and was introduced to Helena via his sister, Annunziata – whose preposterous name probably tells you all you need to know about their pedigree.
“I knew you knew Annunziata, and I knew you were descended from Thomas Wentworth, who’s always been one of my political heroes,” Jacob says to Helena during the show, bringing to mind a kind of rarefied Hinge for posh people. (“How odd that this man seems to know more about my family than I do,” was Helena’s first thought upon meeting Jacob as an adult).
The pair married in 2007, with the agreement that they would have “lots of children” – a pledge they clearly followed through on – and live between their London townhouse a stone’s throw from Westminster and the aforementioned Somerset pad, Gournay Court, described by seven-year-old Sixtus as a “mansion” and downplayed by eight-year-old Alfred as “a sort of old country house”. (Though Alfred is described by Helena as their brightest child, Sixtus seems to have a better grasp on the reality of the situation here.)
Life as aristos is, in some ways, what you would expect. The six children are enrolled in expensive boarding schools and day schools depending on their ages, with the younger ones taken care of by full-time live-in nanny Veronica (the same nanny who raised Jacob and famously accompanied him campaigning as a young Tory candidate). The Somerset gaff has full-time staff in the form of two housekeepers, whose time is spent doing endless laundry loads and starching and ironing Jacob’s boxer shorts, and straight-talking Shaun – a jack-of-all-trades caretaker who does everything from maintaining the Bentley and making cider to shining shoes and lighting fires.
Nothing is luxe or modern in the land of the truly upper class
The most outwardly ostentatious sign of upper-classness comes in the form of weekly black-tie dinners; the whole family don formal wear to give Friday nights a sense of occasion. (Jacob likes things “done properly”, says Shaun.) But even here, we encounter the odd contradictions that distinguish old money from the nouveau riche. You might expect such esteemed folk, dolled up in their finery, to be feasting on sophisticated fare: sea bass, say, or filet mignon; menus peppered with “veloutés”, “red wine reductions” and “truffle shavings”. But you would be sorely disappointed.
“He don’t like posh food, mind,” Shaun reveals of Jacob. “Not a fan of vegetables or onions or anything like that.” The result? The Rees-Moggs sit around the imposing dining table in their 16th-century abode wearing their black-tie best and quaffing champagne – yet eating gammon and mash off the fine china plates.
This is a sphere in which lasagne is classed as “exotic”, there’s not a green veg or hint of spice in sight, and, for all the wealth and privilege, there’s an air of post-war rationing when it comes to flavour. Jacob, rather depressingly, eats a ham and cheese Greggs sandwich every day on the campaign trail; most family meals we see on screen appear to be composed solely of meat and mash. A slab of spam wouldn’t look amiss amid the family silverware.
This austerity continues into the decor, again giving an insight into what really marks one out as “old money” – “old” being the operative word. Old money doesn’t spend money on new things, you see. Dark wood furniture is passed down for generations, sofas are battered and grubby from decades of overuse, wallpaper is chintzy and old-fashioned and rarely replaced. Ancestral paintings may deck the halls, but that’s where the opulence ends; nothing is luxe or modern in the land of the truly upper class. The severely traditional aesthetic extends into the nine bedrooms, whose beds it takes housekeepers Chelsea and Sarah an entire day to strip and remake. (Helena likes them done a certain way, with sheets, eiderdowns and blankets – but no duvets. These being, one can only assume, woefully “common”.)
And then there’s the religious paraphernalia: imposing crucifixes that dominate the walls, and the family’s very own private chapel on site. Priests are regularly invited to come and say mass (pronounced “marse” at this level of poshness), presumably so that the Rees-Moggs aren’t forced to fraternise with the great unwashed in their local parish church. Jacob’s well-documented Catholicism, in keeping with his whole anti-modern shtick, has a pre-Reformation tang to it. He gets very excited while doing a show and tell of his religious “relics” – the hair shift of the blessed Thomas More, a thorn from the crown of thorns – and quizzes his children on the catechism over lunch. One can easily imagine him buying an Indulgence or two to ensure swifter passage from purgatory into heaven when he reaches the afterlife.
The true privilege of the privileged is built on the backs of other people
Yes, the elite sphere of high society in which the Rees-Moggs reside is full of bizarre quirks and anachronisms that make little to no sense to an outsider looking in. But what Meet the Rees-Moggs really reveals is that the true privilege of the privileged is built on the backs of other people. It’s being able to afford to outsource the usually unseen labour that removes much of the stress of daily life: to the nanny who enables you to have six children and not feel completely overwhelmed; the housekeeper who ensures you can have a preference for intricate bedmaking without ever having to make a bed yourself; the chef who facilitates your enjoyment of sit-down family dinners because you never have to shop or cook; the chauffeur who means you can make the eight-hour round trip to Oxfordshire in a day to attend Boris Johnson’s birthday party...
In one scene, we see Jacob’s remarkably sanguine response to the news that someone has defaced the election campaign sign outside his mother’s house. After her report that the culprit must have been extremely tall or had a ladder, he simply says, laughing: “An angry, socialist giant; he’ll be very easy to spot!” In the next shot we see Shaun armed with bucket and sponge, attempting to scrub off the words “posh twat”.
That’s the thing. It’s easy to sit around the table laughing when you’re not the person having to clean the sign – when you spend your entire life, in fact, never having to clean the sign. Or clean the house. Or wash the clothes, make the beds, cook the dinner, or do any of the grimy, mundane, monotonous jobs that grind the rest of us down and root us in reality.
“People feel that politicians are just completely out of touch.” Indeed they do, Jacob. And the likes of the Rees-Moggs prove that they’re probably right.
‘Meet the Rees-Moggs’ airs on Discovery+ from 2 December
