by Stooo » Tue Aug 15, 2017 5:42 pm
So, are you #ReadyforMogg ? The honourable member for the early 20th century is starting to break cover and express his interest in becoming the leader of the Conservatives.
His excitable fans hyperventilate about his authenticity, his wit, his cleverness and how unapologetic he is about his background, as if this is somehow all that’s required to make him fit for the highest office in the land.
Frankly, I think he’s a bit of a fraud. The three-piece suits, the elaborate vocabulary, the exaggerated courtesy - it’s like a third-rate novelist’s idea of the quintessential English gentleman. And very much his own construct. If he’s unashamed of being posh, it’s because he’s not actually as posh as he likes people to believe. Like me, he’s the offspring of a successful middle class professional. In his case, his journalist father had a successful enough career to merit a life peerage, enabling Rees-Mogg to attach an Honourable to the beginning of his name. He married the step-daughter of the Marquess of Bristol, enough for him to claim a spot in Burke’s Peerage, but he’s certainly not an aristocrat.
Mrs Rees-Mogg had the added attraction of a very large personal fortune, which helpfully paid for the family home in the Somerset countryside. Although the Rees-Moggs have a past association with mining in the area, they are not an ancient and noble county family with an ancestral pile - not that Jacob would correct you if that was the impression that you’d formed.
His glittering investment career is often hailed as evidence of his brilliant mind. Apparently contemporaries who worked with him in Hong Kong don’t recall it quite that way - he spent more time sucking up to Chris Patten in the Governor’s Mansion than analysing stocks. But there’s no doubt that the partnership he co-founded in 2007 - Somerset Capital Management - has been extremely successful and brings in a tidy income in addition to his MP’s salary. It’s interesting that the capital became available to set up the partnership in the same year that he married his wife. And, since 2010, when he became an MP, he surely can’t have been working full time for the partnership. I can testify that, in the final quarter of the year to March 2017, JR-M was a diligent attendee in the House of Commons, meaning that his contribution to the profit increase of 42% reported for that year must have been tangential at best.
Catholicism in Britain tends to be heavily centred on the lower rungs of the social scale, being the religion of immigrants - the Irish, and more recently, Poles. But there are a few historically posh Catholic families, who have managed to hang on to their wealth and estates through centuries of religious upheaval. I had assumed, unthinkingly, that Rees-Mogg was from one of those families. But actually, his Catholicism appears to be inherited from his Irish-American actress grandmother. The reverence for the Tridentine Mass and the flamboyantly Latinate names of his children are not part of his family tradition, then, but just his own personal taste.
But, to be honest, I don’t actually care if he wants to dress up in silly clothes and flounce around pretending to be Lord of the Manor. I don’t care that he’s never changed a nappy. Where and how he came into his wealth is no concern of mine. His affectations and pretensions are his own business.
But I do care that his politics appear to be an extension of this construct. I do care that his speech in the Article 50 debate (which I remember well because it immediately followed mine) argued that Brexit would be a success because it was the next stage in a sugary, unrealistic triumphalist version of British history that frames his own particular world view. I do care that this undeliverable fantasy has captured the British nation and threatens to doom us all. I do care that people seem to take Jacob Rees Mogg seriously. He is playing a part, striking a pose, and only adopts political positions for effect.
Thinking of posh Catholic families, I flicked through my old copy of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ today (it has Jeremy Irons on the cover and it occurs to me that the television series would have been broadcast just as JR-M was starting at Eton). It tickles me to think of Rees-Mogg as a more resolute, unthwarted version of Charles Ryder - a socially insecure middle-class Londoner bewitched by a country house and a Catholic aristocratic family.
Incidentally, the subtitle for the second chapter is “A warning against charm”. Wise words……..
Sarah Olney, FB
[quote]So, are you #ReadyforMogg ? The honourable member for the early 20th century is starting to break cover and express his interest in becoming the leader of the Conservatives.
His excitable fans hyperventilate about his authenticity, his wit, his cleverness and how unapologetic he is about his background, as if this is somehow all that’s required to make him fit for the highest office in the land.
Frankly, I think he’s a bit of a fraud. The three-piece suits, the elaborate vocabulary, the exaggerated courtesy - it’s like a third-rate novelist’s idea of the quintessential English gentleman. And very much his own construct. If he’s unashamed of being posh, it’s because he’s not actually as posh as he likes people to believe. Like me, he’s the offspring of a successful middle class professional. In his case, his journalist father had a successful enough career to merit a life peerage, enabling Rees-Mogg to attach an Honourable to the beginning of his name. He married the step-daughter of the Marquess of Bristol, enough for him to claim a spot in Burke’s Peerage, but he’s certainly not an aristocrat.
Mrs Rees-Mogg had the added attraction of a very large personal fortune, which helpfully paid for the family home in the Somerset countryside. Although the Rees-Moggs have a past association with mining in the area, they are not an ancient and noble county family with an ancestral pile - not that Jacob would correct you if that was the impression that you’d formed.
His glittering investment career is often hailed as evidence of his brilliant mind. Apparently contemporaries who worked with him in Hong Kong don’t recall it quite that way - he spent more time sucking up to Chris Patten in the Governor’s Mansion than analysing stocks. But there’s no doubt that the partnership he co-founded in 2007 - Somerset Capital Management - has been extremely successful and brings in a tidy income in addition to his MP’s salary. It’s interesting that the capital became available to set up the partnership in the same year that he married his wife. And, since 2010, when he became an MP, he surely can’t have been working full time for the partnership. I can testify that, in the final quarter of the year to March 2017, JR-M was a diligent attendee in the House of Commons, meaning that his contribution to the profit increase of 42% reported for that year must have been tangential at best.
Catholicism in Britain tends to be heavily centred on the lower rungs of the social scale, being the religion of immigrants - the Irish, and more recently, Poles. But there are a few historically posh Catholic families, who have managed to hang on to their wealth and estates through centuries of religious upheaval. I had assumed, unthinkingly, that Rees-Mogg was from one of those families. But actually, his Catholicism appears to be inherited from his Irish-American actress grandmother. The reverence for the Tridentine Mass and the flamboyantly Latinate names of his children are not part of his family tradition, then, but just his own personal taste.
But, to be honest, I don’t actually care if he wants to dress up in silly clothes and flounce around pretending to be Lord of the Manor. I don’t care that he’s never changed a nappy. Where and how he came into his wealth is no concern of mine. His affectations and pretensions are his own business.
But I do care that his politics appear to be an extension of this construct. I do care that his speech in the Article 50 debate (which I remember well because it immediately followed mine) argued that Brexit would be a success because it was the next stage in a sugary, unrealistic triumphalist version of British history that frames his own particular world view. I do care that this undeliverable fantasy has captured the British nation and threatens to doom us all. I do care that people seem to take Jacob Rees Mogg seriously. He is playing a part, striking a pose, and only adopts political positions for effect.
Thinking of posh Catholic families, I flicked through my old copy of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ today (it has Jeremy Irons on the cover and it occurs to me that the television series would have been broadcast just as JR-M was starting at Eton). It tickles me to think of Rees-Mogg as a more resolute, unthwarted version of Charles Ryder - a socially insecure middle-class Londoner bewitched by a country house and a Catholic aristocratic family.
Incidentally, the subtitle for the second chapter is “A warning against charm”. Wise words……..[/quote]
Sarah Olney, FB
