JAcob Rees-Mogg’s new reality show might sound as appealing as flushing your whole head down the toilet. Yet Meet the Rees-Moggs (on Discovery+) is such a baffling piece of television that it might come up in conversation for 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.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Somerset home is covered in portraits of Jacob Rees-Mogg. It’s so plastered with pictures of him that you’ll soon lose count. There is a picture of him as a teenager. There is a painting of him imitating Aaron Schickler’s portrait of John F. Kennedy. There’s one painting where he’s standing in front of another painting, which is pretty early of him. The best, however, is a painting of him in which one of his six children is forced to stare during trumpet practice.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg is crazy Greggs. Apparently, he says, he buys a ham and cheese baguette and a chocolate eclair for lunch every day. However, he says this on the campaign trail and then never mentions it again after losing his seat, so maybe it’s just a misguided attempt to pander to the electorate.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg is a picky eater. Perhaps Greggs’ fascination is due to his strange eating habits. For example, he doesn’t like yellow food, and a member of his household points out, “He’s not a fan of vegetables or onions or anything like that.”
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Jacob Rees-Mogg describes the same member of staff, a man named Sean, as someone who “does everything that needs to be done in a busy household“. This includes “making cider and looking after Bentley”. His duties also appear to have included erasing the words “posh dork” from campaign posters and, in one case, putting the word “champagne” on a portrait of Robert Peel.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg sleeps perfectly still. It was as if he were in a grave, he says. Cooling.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg quotes his election concession speech all the time. When he lost his seat this year, he quoted Chitty Chitty Bang Bang saying, “From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success.” He also used that exact phrase when his dog ate one of his daughter’s sausages off the floor.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg is sent into apoplexy by the idea of traveling badgers. During his post-election slump, and inspired by his daughter’s desire to emulate Carrie Johnson, he briefly entertained the idea of digging a duck pond in his garden. When the planning permission report states that the lake could get in the way of traveling badgers, he throws a bit of a tantrum and gives up.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg doesn’t pack his bags alone.
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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 part of Thomas More’s shirt. It’s illegal to buy and sell these kinds of items, he says, but it’s not necessarily illegal to buy and sell the containers they happen to go into. What an unexpected wheeler dealer.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg is capable of emotion. But only for a short time, and only if you look hard enough. He doesn’t flinch when he loses his seat, nor does he flinch when a promise to become leader of the Conservative Party is ripped from him at the last minute. But when he Facetimes his daughter shortly after she’s been sent to boarding school—something he struggled to adjust to as a child and she’s clearly not thrilled about either—he breaks off very briefly in a very subdued, English, privately educated way . Perhaps, buried deep beneath the many layers of self-parody he has constructed around himself, he does have a heart.
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Jacob Rees-Mogg makes his children dress in black tie for Saturday night dinner.
