Here Is Where The Costume Stops Being Funny

From Hunt & Gather:

There is a particular type in English public life who has done more quiet damage to this country than any number of obvious villains. He is not an aristocrat. He is something more useful to himself: a man who has worked out that looking like one is a career. Jacob Rees-Mogg is the finished version of the type, so he will do as the specimen. Tucker Carlson's interview with Rees-Mogg yesterday in our view revealed how little lies beneath the act.

I'll start with what is actually true, because the costume depends on lazy checking. His father, William Rees-Mogg, edited The Times from 1967 to 1981. He failed his scholarship to Eton and went to Charterhouse instead, then Balliol, where he became President of the Oxford Union. He was knighted in 1981, having been High Sheriff of Somerset. He was made a life peer on 8 August 1988, in Thatcher's Birthday Honours, as Baron Rees-Mogg of Hinton Blewett, and he sat as a crossbencher.

There is no medieval grant anywhere in this. There is a successful journalist who was given a title at sixty, which is the modern English method of acquiring one without the inconvenience of having had to knife some poor bastard at Bosworth Field. Behind him there is land. A Mogg bought the manor of Cholwell in 1726. A Rees-Mogg rebuilt Cholwell House in 1855 — a country solicitor. That is three centuries of minor Somerset gentry: respectable, local, and about as aristocratic as a prosperous dentist with a nice lawn. The family's own trajectory makes the point. The father stretched himself to buy Ston Easton Park in 1964 and had to sell it in 1978.

On the other side the lineage is plainer still. Jacob's mother, Gillian Shakespeare Morris, was his father's secretary. Her father was a lorry driver and car salesman who became Conservative mayor of St Pancras. None of this is meant as judgement, from the grandson of a squaddie and a housemaid. It is an ordinary and rather admirable English story. But it is not the story being performed, and it is not the one being tacitly laid claim to by Mogg and his influence peddling ilk in their continued self-enriching betrayal of the people of this island.

What the son built on it is the performance. Eton, Trinity College Oxford, the City, a fund management company, a large house in Somerset - and a manner that seeks to suggest to those who don't know better that the last century and a half has been a clerical error. The vowels, the Latin, the Nanny, the children named as though from a parish register. None of this is the unselfconscious habit of a man raised among Holbeins. It is the habit of an ambitious man who noticed that a certain audience both home and abroad still finds it charming, and made a deliberate decision not to update the software. Reclining full-length on the green benches during the 2019 Brexit debate was the purest expression of it. Not contempt for Parliament, exactly. Something worse: the assumption that the scene was his to furnish. He wasn't 'caught napping'. He wanted the world to see he has the right to nap there, for the next time he picks the phone up to them.

The comparison that makes the type visible is Boris Johnson, because the two of them perform the same class from opposite ends. Rees-Mogg arrives as a finished Victorian. Pressed, buttoned, word-perfect, every vowel in its appointed place, as though he had stepped out of a carriage and found the twenty-first century already disappointing. Johnson arrives apparently mid-collapse — hair disordered on purpose, shirt escaping, the Greek deployed as though it had surprised him on the way in. One performs order, the other performs chaos, and both are performing the same claim: that they are from somewhere you are not, and may therefore be forgiven things - and given other things, that you are not.

The joke is that Johnson has the better pedigree. He is a documented descendant of George II through an illegitimate line, which is more royal blood than anybody at Cholwell ever got near. He simply calculated, correctly, that studied shambles sells better in a television age than studied precision. Rees-Mogg bet on the Victorian, Johnson bet on the Regency rake. Both bet a great deal on never really being made to pay for anything they have done, because that is what they teach the world has in store for them at Eton. Here is where the costume stops being funny.

The old landed class, at its least fictional, came with serious obligations. They were tied to a place. They spent a lot of their time thinking about drainage and tenancies and who was ill in the village. They turned up at Quarter Sessions. They turned up if one of your people needed help. The arrangement was indefensible in principle and occasionally useful in practice, because the man with the manner - and the manor - also had the responsibility, and the responsibility was local, specific and inescapable.

Carlson mentioned that Eton lost eleven hundred old boys in the First World War. Rees-Mogg corrected him: twelve hundred. He was right; he is nothing if not good with numbers. But the number that matters is that around five thousand six hundred Old Etonians served — which, for a school of a thousand boys, is very close to every single one of military age. They all went. One in five did not come back, against one in eight across the army as a whole, because they went in as subalterns and subalterns led from the front. That is what the manner — and the manor — used to cost. The diction, the Latin, the expectation of deference — and the understanding that when it came, you went first and you died at twice the rate of the men you commanded. Show of hands: who thinks Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees Mogg would ever go to war, or send their children to one? Thought not. 

In 1914 the bill was presented by the people to the Old Etonians, and it was paid in full. Mogg's version has the diction, but if it comes on top he will have forgotten his wallet, mark my words. The modern version has stripped the obligation out and kept the manner. It is aristocracy as lifestyle brand: all the diction, none of the damp. It travels well to television studios and party conferences. It requires no knowledge of anything in particular. Crucially, it can be set aside entirely when the spreadsheets want attention — Rees-Mogg co-founded Somerset Capital Management, whose funds were domiciled in the Cayman Islands and Singapore while he was arguing for Britain to leave the European Union, and he has been reasonably candid about having done well out of the aftermath.

That is the mechanism. Not hypocrisy, which is too small a word and too easily shrugged off. Unearned authority, is what it is. The manner is a claim to be taken seriously about everything while being accountable for nothing, and in a country still ludicrously susceptible to vowels, it works. Housing, wages, the mechanics of leaving the EU — all met with the same amused detachment a man might deploy when a guest reaches for the wrong fork. Detachment is easy when the fork is not yours.

Multiply him by thousands. That is what I want to leave you with. He is not one eccentric; he is the visible end of a class of people who learned that a borrowed accent and a borrowed confidence are the cheapest capital available in British public life. They run government departments. They sit on boards, edit papers, advise ministers, chair inquiries. They are fluent, charming, entirely unencumbered by expertise, and they have been failing upwards for forty years while the people who actually know how the drains work are told there is no money. The real aristocracy, whatever else can be said against it, could at least be found. It was attached to somewhere. You knew whose land you were standing on and therefore who to blame. The replacements have the manner and no address. The manner, but no manor - just a registered office in the Caymans. There is nobody to send the bill to.

So: enjoy the theatre or ignore it, according to taste. The suit is well cut, the house is large, and the man is amusing at times. Just don't mistake it for a title. The peerage came from Margaret Thatcher in 1988, for services to journalism. As for the squire of North East Somerset — he had the seat from 2010 until 2024, when the boundaries were redrawn. He stood again, and the people among whom his family had lived for three hundred years politely declined. Yesterday he told Carlson: "I hope to stand at the next election. We have a democracy that functions." The costume is paid for and the audience has not entirely dispersed. But if he comes up your road with his shiny blue rosette and nice vowels keep in mind: fake aristocrats only ever represent themselves.