The unstoppable rise of Jacob Rees-Mogg (and in praise of barmaids)
Anyone who has ever been involved – even on the fringes – in student politics will recognise the type in the sunglasses and baseball cap in the now infamous Jacob Rees-Mogg video. He berated the Tory MP at a meeting on Friday evening held in Bristol. There followed much shouting, jostling by the crowd, and some light fisticuffs (all a bit “handbags,” to be frank.) We discovered in the media furore that followed that the main man in the sunglasses and baseball cap is called Connor. He works in recruiting (of course he does.) Josh Connor stood, unsuccessfully, for student president three years ago. Three years ago! But he still spent a Friday evening at a university heckling Jacob Rees-Mogg. It is a very particular type who does this.
Connor’s grandmother was unimpressed by his behaviour. She told a reporter that she had thought until then her grandson was maturing. His antics suggest her optimism was premature. Josh is a very keen socialist, she added, somewhat to the left of Trotsky.
Jacob Rees-Mogg emerges from this row as a hero for our times, having walked purposefully towards the protesters and attempted to reason with them. Good for him. Then the fight broke out.
While in some respects this incident is nothing new – cabinet ministers from the 1980s tell tales of constant “eggings” and violence when they dared go anywhere near a university – the case illustrates what has changed.
1) Social media meant the incident was transmitted and shared widely, rapidly. The scuffle would hardly have merited a news in brief 25 years ago in the Sunday papers. Now, it is a major media sensation.
2) The protestors were masked. This may be because they fear exposure on social media, or because they are hot for the riot chic of the deranged Antifa hard left that will probably get Donald Trump reelected in 2020. Whatever the explanation, the hoodies and sunglasses add a sinister and menacing touch. Peaceful protest is legitimate, but in a democracy we should all be able to see the faces of our critics.
3) JRM is unashamedly a capitalist, in an era when capitalists are forever apologising or opining (I am guilty) about how it might be fixed. There is something refreshing and insurgent about his willingness to make the arguments for profit and enterprise.
4) In the 1980s, the Labour leadership was trying to expel the far left and distance itself from protestors and agitators. Now, the leader of the Labour party is surrounded by Stalinists and Leninists. Hardline Marxists have captured the former redoubt of the mainstream left and are purging their way through the party. This is a national tragedy, of course, but the menacing muppetry could well, as Dan Hodges argued in the weekend’s Mail on Sunday, aid the Tories in the years to come. British voters do not like violence and intimidation.
That being so, might the voters warm to the new chalk-stripe suit pin-up of the Brexit cause? Might they decide, in the age of Corbyn, that they are not going to have their choices on who they like governed by a broken media elite idea of what a modern leader should look like? Perhaps, or perhaps not, but to test this, first JRM would have to win a Tory leadership contest. That is far from straightforward. If a contest does happen, and the despair of MPs is such that I think on balance that May will be removed, then the list of contenders will be whittled down to a final two by MPs to go out to the depleted membership. Mogg might win with the membership, but it is unlikely Tory MPs would take the risk of putting him in the final two.
This may suit him. A personality cult – partly tongue-in-cheek, partly serious – has been developing among a coalition of younger Tories, and robust veterans in the grassroots, that he can play for advantage. The government has been making a mess of Brexit. It still has no position on what kind of trade deal it wants with the EU, although the suggestion is that the cabinet is on the verge of agreeing a position – with no long-term commitment to staying in a Customs Union – this week. In contrast to this deal-making, Rees-Mogg looks clear, unsullied and principled. This is always easy from outside government, which makes Number 10’s decision to not give him a senior post in government in the reshuffle downright daft.
Overlooked, Rees-Mogg promptly became the chief enforcer of the ERG (the European Research Group, of which more than 50 Tory MPs are members.) He is now the leader of backbench Brexiteers who are increasingly assertive.
It was in this Westminster context that demonstrators who turned up on Friday at the Rees-Mogg event in Bristol gave him a boost, unwittingly. The fracas came just at the point when he faced justified criticism over the Steve Baker, lunch at Prospect, Treasury figures row of last week that is far too boring to explain, other than to say that Jacob had gone too far. He had got hold of the wrong end of the stick and proceeded to beat about the bush with it. He is a lucky politician, and lucky for him his heroics on campus eclipsed the argument over the Treasury.
Only recently has it dawned on the media class that a Rees-Mogg run for the leadership is a subject to be taken seriously. Unfamiliarity with the notion means that critics are having some trouble getting a fix on him. Part of the problem is that he is so polite. When I wrote a piece last year criticising Jacob, rather rudely, he made sure to say thank you.
Matthew Norman in a piece for the Independent website is the latest to go over the top. He describes Rees-Mogg as follows:
“For all the pretence to altruistic patriotism… this is just another attention-craving mega-narcissist. It’s me-me-me with him – or, as the French tauntingly chant at him when he takes the vintage Bentley to Normandy, “Moggy, Moggy, Moggy, moi, moi, moi!”
There will be readers who think that it really takes the biscuit for journalists and commentators to accuse other people of being attention-craving mega-narcissists, but there you go.
My colleague at The Times, Matthew Parris, gave Jacob the best duffing up in his column on Saturday. It contained within it, however, one misfired joke that was extremely revealing about the class angle of what is going on with the rise of Rees-Mogg.
Matthew quoted the novelist Robert Harris, who has described Jacob as the “barmaid’s idea of a gentleman.”
That is a typically sharp line, but there is something deeply wrong, and inherently middle class, about it. Anyone who knows pubs (raises hand) respects barmaids and knows not to take the piss out of them. In most pubs, their main customers will be men. An experienced barmaid will have heard more rubbish talked by men about politics and sport than the researchers working on an LBC phone-in.
Into the barmaid’s pub steps Jacob Rees-Mogg. He has no interest in Association Football. He is unfailingly polite, comfortable in his own skin and not trying to show off. He probably asks for “a glass of beer” (okay, there’s an affectation) but the barmaid knows that if there is any trouble it will be this fine and upstanding gentleman separating the combatants and trying to keep the police out of it. If the trouble persists, Jacob will tell a funny story about Margaret Thatcher. Everyone will coo and laugh, apart from the sour old leftie perched at the end of the bar reading a copy of the Daily Mirror.
If the barmaid judges Jacob Rees-Mogg to be a gentleman, this is in part because of the contrast with others. Like most women, she knows much more about men than men think she does.
Jacob’s emerging popularity – among Tories – illustrates the existence of one of the most powerful and overlooked alliances in British political history. That is the alliance between a large slice of the working class and the upper class, which remains part of the Tory coalition of interests. How else could the Tories have won so often since the franchise extension of the Second Reform Act of 1867? This drives middle class Marxists potty. Why don’t all the workers know that socialism is supposedly good for them? They’re not stupid, that’s why.
It is at this point that a lot of middle class journalists (I’m one myself) will cry that Jacob Rees-Mogg is not properly aristocratic, calling him a fake toff, which is a very middle class observation in itself. Speaking of lineage, his father was terrific. One of the best conversations I ever had at a lunch was with William Rees-Mogg, the former editor of The Times, in which he described the origins and consequences of the seminal “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” leader written during the controversy over the jailing of Jagger and Richards in 1967 for drugs offences.
Anyway, although his son has got something special in terms of a potential connection with voters, he is high risk, which means that stopping him becoming leader is now an urgent task for the elders of the Tory tribe. He is the favourite with the bookies.
Yet, Rees-Mogg does not even need to win the leadership to become a power. As head of the ERG he is already in a very powerful position on Brexit. While much of the focus in term of parliamentary shenanigans of the small group of anti-Brexit rebels, the hardline Brexiteers of the ERG have the power to bring down the government if any compromise with Brussels is deemed too much. I doubt they would do it, but the party leadership – May’s lost leadership, or the next leadership – cannot risk offending them.
What looks like a more pragmatic solution is JRM using his popularity with Tories to broker his way into a prominent cabinet position as part of an attempted “unity” administration. This means Jacob wins every way, even without running for the leadership. As the shop-steward of the ERG he holds the government in the palm of his hand on Brexit. And the person who replaces May cannot overlook him, for fear of infuriating his fans. Or he gambles, runs and wins…
This is a highly positive range of outcomes for someone regarded until recently by his critics as a joke. No one is laughing now.