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Sunday 10 September 2017

Jacob Rees-Mogg and the sleep of reason

Quentin Letts made the worst mistake possible when he described Jacob Rees-Mogg as the Honourable Member for the Eighteenth Century.  To tag JRM as an authentic survival of the era of squires and slavery is to make the basic error of taking the man at face value.  That the son of a journalist from Hammersmith can dress and talk like JRM in the year 2017 is not a sign of the persistence of historical conservatism - it amounts to a radically postmodern form of identity fluidity, a kind of hard-right equivalent of declaring oneself to be genderqueer.  In this sense, JRM is several degrees more radical than Jeremy Corbyn, who has never pretended to be anything other than a middle-class lefty.  It is JRM's good fortune that his eyecatching identity-shopping has coincided with a tendency to treat politics as a species of entertainment, a tendency which gives an advantage to "characters" like Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage over dull worthies like Amber Rudd and Vince Cable.

His schtick does not hold up to any kind of scrutiny.  Marina Hyde, a genuinely blue-blooded Guardian columnist, has commented that JRM is a P.G. Wodehouse fan's idea of what a posh person is like (and what fun Wodehouse's satirical pen would have had with someone like Rees-Mogg).  Imagine what the Queen thinks of his nonsense - or, better yet, Prince Philip.  This is why the short-lived Tory boy organisation Activate was so unwise to use this graphic:

Image result for conservative activate

The fact is that Corbo's brand of Islingtonian socialism is a familiar and well established part of British society, from Sidney and Beatrice Webb to Tony Crosland to Tony Benn.  We British may or may not agree with the views held by such people; but poseurs are in an altogether different league of contempt.

From time to time, the mistakes show, if you know what to look for.  His first Tweet was in Latin - "Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis", "Times change, and we change with them".  But he was not a good enough classicist to realise that this isn't a genuine Roman phrase, but rather a new coinage originating among German Protestants in the Reformation.  So much for JRM the ultra-Catholic (and we'll come back to that again later).  Likewise, calling his sixth child Sixtus sounds like less of a witty cerebral joke if one knows, as a real Latin scholar would, that "Sextus" is the Latin for "sixth" and the name Sixtus has a completely different etymology.  What's more, the last famous person in history called Sixtus was Pope Sixtus V, who agreed to fund the Spanish Armada and excommunicated Queen Elizabeth I.  What was that about "nobody more British" again?

It's tempting to say that the man himself must be aware of his own inauthenticity.  After all, he's not stupid.  When he made his infamous comment about his nanny and his valet back in 1997, he must have known that very few men in Britain, even wealthy men from old families, still employed valets at that time.  Nannies were not that common either, before the increase in Eastern European migrants on the labour market during the Blair years made them a viable option for a larger number of affluent families.  JRM cannot not have known this; and yet he chose to say what he said.  Did he want people to see that he was a fake?  Was it just a sad attempt at attention seeking?  Did he genuinely not realise how transparent he was?

Probably the latter.  The fact is that Rees-Mogg has been behaving like this for years.  He acted like a tit at university.  Even before that, when he was 16, he was talking about listening to the "wireless".  As Google Ngrams will confirm, the word "radio" had already superseded "wireless" in British English by 1940.  A guy who was already making this sort of clumsy linguistic choice in his mid-teens might well come to believe in his own persona.  Calling it affectation fails to grasp the full weirdness of what is going on.  JRM never breaks character, and the suspicion must be that this is because the sub-Wodehousian facade really is his character.  It has been his inner and outer life since his childhood.  You would need a psychiatrist to tell you the full implications of this, but you don't need a medical degree to know that he's not a man that you'd want running the country.

His politics only make it worse.  Part of the ideology of the traditional English gentleman was noblesse oblige - a paternalistic sense of duty towards the poorer members of society.  It didn't work out in practice, of course, but the ideal was there.  Maybe JRM has adopted that, along with the retro tailoring and interwar vocabulary?




















Ah.  Seems not then.

In truth, JRM's politics are less William Pitt than Norman Tebbit.  His political stance is based on an essentially uncritical admiration of Thatcherite capitalism and a contempt for social equality.  He criticised David Cameron's coalition with the Lib Dems and called for a deal with UKIP instead.  He endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election (and then backtracked after the pussy-grabbing tape was released).  He spoke up for Sir Philip Green of BHS when even the Daily Mail had turned against him.  He spoke at a dinner of the far-right Traditional Britain Group in 2013.  He later distanced himself from the organisation when he found out how overtly racist it was, but this raises more questions than it answers.  Did he fit in so well with these guys that he didn't notice anything amiss during the evening itself?

And so to his latest foray into the public eye - his statements last week to the effect that he opposes gay marriage and abortion.  His position on these issues is more revealing than has generally been realised.  An apologist might say, well, his views are out of step with the mainstream, but at least they show that he has integrity insofar as he is adhering in conscience to the teachings of his church.  Except that he isn't.  JRM is well able to reject Catholic teachings when it suits him to do so.  The Catholic Church has a long record of denouncing unrestricted capitalism, and Rees-Mogg has no problem in expressing dissent from that.  He told Parliament that Pope Pius XI's great social encyclical Quadragesimo Anno had moved the church in a "socialist direction" - but he could ignore it because it wasn't technically an infallible statement.  He learnt this stuff from his father William Rees-Mogg, who expressly rejected Rerum Novarum, another papal condemnation of right-wing economics.  So JRM, like most educated Catholics today, knows damn well where the loopholes are.  He must also know that the teachings that an embryo is a full human being from the moment of conception, and that marriage must be exclusively heterosexual, are not infallible either.  But he doesn't use the loopholes there.  He supports regressive social policies not because they are the will of God but because they are the will of Mogg.

This man will probably never lead his country... but then they said that about Trump too.  We live in strange times, and no-one should bet against JRM inflicting his neuroses on the United Kingdom from Number 10 Downing Street.