Jacob rees-mogg

Michael Portillo: Jacob Rees-Mogg offers what the public is crying out for

With doubts about Theresa May’s leadership rising, talk has turned – once again – to who might replace her. Jacob Rees-Mogg has topped this month’s ConservativeHome leadership poll of members. So, is Moggmentum what the public needs? That’s the suggestion made by Michael Portillo. Speaking on This Week, the Tory stalwart conceded that Rees-Mogg could have some of the answers: AN: Jacob Rees-Mogg is now the bookies’ favourite and indeed in some internal Tory party polling is the favourite to succeed, what do you make of that? MP: I make of it that he is now one of about five or six Tories that the public can name, and that

Stepford students come for Jacob Rees-Mogg

Here we go. First the Stepford students at LSE submitted a motion to ban the university’s free-speech society, next City University students tried banning newspapers at the institution famed for its journalism school, then Lincoln University’s Student Union suspended the Conservative Society’s social media use after young Tories dared to suggest that the powers-that-be were intolerant of free speech. And now, it’s the turn of Jacob Rees-Mogg. The Moggster is due to speak at Queen Mary University of London this week: However the university’s Socialist Worker Student Society takes a different view – they say: ‘This is our campus, and we won’t have politicians who are against the welfare and freedom of

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s new Brexit role will worry No 10

Although Jacob Rees-Mogg missed out on a promotion in last week’s reshuffle, the Moggster has at least got a new string to add to his bow. The Conservative backbencher has been appointed chairman of the all-powerful ‘European Research Group’ – replacing Suella Fernandes. The group has been described by the Times as the ‘most powerful opposition force in British politics’ but in effect is a place for the Conservative party’s most dedicated Brexiteers to congregate, liaise and come up with a counter to any position (government or not) that looks a bit too Remain for their liking. In that vein, they have a special Tory WhatsApp group – separate to the

Jacob Rees-Mogg wins a celebrity backer

Although Theresa May looks safe in No 10 for the time being, chatter continues behind closed doors over who her eventual successor could be. While Gavin Williamson and Boris Johnson are both seen to have difficulty hiding their own leadership ambitions, it’s Jacob Rees-Mogg who most regularly tops the polls when it comes to Tory members’ preference for leader. Should he decide to take the plunge, he need look no further than jungle queen Georgia ‘Toff’ Toffolo for his first celebrity endorsement. The Made in Chelsea star – who just won I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! has given an interview to the Sunday Times in which she

Celebrity Dear Mary | 13 December 2017

From Sir Vince Cable MP Q. I have an unfulfilled ambition to win a national title for ballroom dancing in my age group. But this leadership thing gets in the way of my training. What’s more important — Parliament’s squabbling schoolroom or Blackpool’s twinkle-toes ballroom? A. What’s all this either/or business? These days the only way to become a leader is to become a celebrity first. Viz Trump. If they like you as leader it won’t be because you’ve got the ‘leadership thing’ — it will have been the twinkle toes that swung it. From Jacob Rees-Mogg MP Q. My two eldest sons are becoming quite good at playing the trumpet

Jacob Rees-Mogg: a sartorial standard-bearer

The best-dressed politician of all time was Anthony Eden. His style was something out of an Apparel Arts illustration; long jackets, peaked lapels on single-breasted jackets (a good 60 years before Tom Ford would revive it), high-waist trousers and double-breasted waistcoats. Even the fabled hatter Lock and Co renamed the Homburg hat ‘the Eden’. Those were the days of Porfirio Rubirosa, Mountbatten and the Aga Khan, when the idea of the sartorial statesman was unexceptional. As things stand, Jacob Rees-Mogg will never leave behind that kind of legacy. By the lore of classic style, there isn’t anything particularly special about a suit, shirt, tie and polished shoes. He doesn’t embellish

Pregnant silence

Brian Sewell once wrote an article about abortion headlined: ‘Women, the killers in our midst.’ He got an awful lot of flak for it, which he took in his stride. He came to mind during the screening of Abortion On Trial, the documentary hosted by Anne Robinson and screened this week to mark the 50th anniversary of the passing of the 1967 Abortion Act. In it, one of the participants described abortion as murder. ‘Are nine of us here… murderers?’ asked Mrs Robinson with a flourish, to which the only tactful answer was no, of course not. Brian would unhesitatingly have said yes. Abortion is one of those issues about

Moggmentum comes to Tory conference

After a lacklustre policy announcement on tuition fees followed by a disappointing turn on the Marr show, Theresa May’s Conservative conference has not got off to the best of starts. However, as MPs fume about their leader’s failings, members are at least managing to get excited about one Tory politician… Step forward Jacob Rees-Mogg. This afternoon Moggmentum hit Tory conference. Eager conference attendees started queuing for a Jacob Rees-Mogg fringe event on Brexit an hour before it began. With half an hour to go, the queue was so long it blocked the entrance to the conference centre. Security staff then had to bend it so that the fire exit was

High life | 28 September 2017

I think this week marks my 40th anniversary as a Spectator columnist, but I’m not 100 per cent certain. All I know is that I was 39 or 40 years old when the column began, and that I’ve just had my 81st birthday. Keeping a record is not my strong point, and it’s also a double-edged sword. I once planned to publish my diary, but then I stopped keeping one. I’d found passages in it that were dishonest, written in the heat of the moment, most likely under the influence, and the result was a bum-clenching embarrassment. Now I don’t use any social media, certainly not Twitter, Facebook or Instagram,

Jacob Rees-Mogg sees red

Although Theresa May did manage to prevent a revolt breaking out after her speech in Florence yesterday, that’s not to say anyone in Cabinet is particularly pleased by her words. The Prime Minister did buy herself more time – but failed to clearly say where she what direction she was planning to go in that period. On the backbenches, Conservative MPs have less reason to hold their tongue over such concerns – as Jacob Rees-Mogg demonstrated on Newsnight. The Brexiteer MP has been the first out of the blocks to express concern over what May said – and the red lines she may have crossed: ‘I have three concerns about

Face time | 14 September 2017

The inimitably pukka voice of Jacob Rees-Mogg echoed through Radio 4 on Thursday morning. He was not, though, talking about nappies, nannies or even Brexit; his topic instead was death masks and specifically that made of his father William, the newspaper editor and vice-chairman of the BBC, who died in 2012. Not long after Rees-Mogg had passed from this life, his facial features were immortalised in wax and silicon rubber by Nick Reynolds, godson of Ronnie Biggs and son of Bruce Reynolds (whose names you may recall from the great train robbery of August 1963). In Death Masks: The Undying Face (produced by Helen Lee), Reynolds talked us through the

A civil answer to the marriage question

There was a bit of a kerfuffle last week regarding Jacob Rees-Mogg’s view on same-sex marriage. He is opposed but effectively said that it wasn’t up to him to decide: ‘I take the teachings of the Catholic Church seriously. Marriage is a sacrament and the decision of what is a sacrament lies with the Church not with Parliament.’ And yet, marriage is, self-evidently, defined by Parliament. It has a precise definition in law and that definition has been extended to include people in homosexual relationships. It has been extended to permit people who have been previously married and divorced to re-marry, despite religious objections. It is also restricted to people over

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s views are more common than his critics might care to believe

To judge from the media’s collective horror, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s views on abortion (‘completely opposed… in all circumstances?’ ‘Yes’) and same-sex marriage (‘I support the teaching of the Catholic Church’ – i.e., against) are absolutely beyond the pale. Such ‘appalling bigotry’, as Suzanne Moore puts it in The Guardian, has ‘no place in public life’. Meanwhile, the Evening Standard’s curation of Twitter vox pops runs the full gamut from ‘extreme’ to ‘extremely out of touch’. Any hopes he may secretly have harboured of becoming PM must, hopes everyone from The Times cartoon to Gary Lineker, now be ‘aborted’. But just how extreme are the Hon. Member for North East Somerset’s views

Jacob Rees-Mogg wins an election

Although Jacob Rees-Mogg recently topped a ConHome poll as the number one choice to be the next Tory leader, few believe he has the mainstream appeal to lead the party to victory in a general election. However, Rees-Mogg can take heart that he has just secured enough votes to win a prestigious place on the Brexit select committee. With 14 Tories vying for the 10 available seats on the Exiting the EU Committee, the Brexit bunch have proved triumphant: Peter Bone Chris Chope Stephen Crabb Jonathan Djanogly Richard Graham Andrea Jenkyns Jeremy Lefroy Craig Mackinlay Jacob Rees-Mogg John Whittingdale Alas Anna Soubry hasn’t been so successful – the Remain MP

Can leading politicians get away with opposing abortion and gay marriage?

What can politicians with socially conservative beliefs expect from public life? Is there now a faith glass ceiling under which lurks would-be party leaders whose views on abortion and homosexuality are just too unpalatable for voters? If there is one, Jacob Rees-Mogg might have a good chance of telling us where it is located. The alleged contender for the Tory leadership told Good Morning Britain today that abortion was ‘morally indefensible’ in any circumstances and that he opposed same-sex marriage because ‘marriage is a sacrament and the decision of what is a sacrament lies with the Church not with Parliament’. William Hill has already cut the North East Somerset MP’s

Freddy Gray

In defence of Jacob Rees-Mogg

The art of Jacob Rees-Mogg is to be preposterous and sincere at the same time. It’s the reason why he is increasingly popular. It explains Moggmania. It’s also why people are now beginning to take him seriously as a Tory leadership contender; why he is topping the polls for that job. It helps that he is a gent, a man who treats everyone with courtesy, which has always been popular. But it is his ability to be genuine while coming across as absurd – or is it the other way round — that makes voters warm to him. A bit like Jeremy Corbyn. Take Mogg’s interview this morning. His views about

Meet ‘other’ – the candidate to beat Jacob Rees-Mogg for Tory leader

Although Damian Green has insisted Theresa May will lead the party into the next election, this hasn’t stopped Jacob Rees-Mogg receiving the first ‘official endorsement’ for leader. Last night, Activate – the questionable attempt at a ‘Tory momentum’ – announced that it was backing the Moggster. Given that this grassroots movement is yet to take off, it’s  unlikely to cause CCHQ much concern just yet. However, today’s Conservative Home survey might. In a sign that Moggmentum isn’t just confined to Facebook groups, Jacob Rees-Mogg has topped ConHome’s Next Tory Leader survey of party members. A candidate by the name of ‘other’ comes a close second, while David Davis is now third favourite followed by Dominic

Steerpike

Jacob Rees-Mogg drops a hint about what job he wants in the reshuffle

Although Jacob Rees-Mogg likes to insist that he is an unsuitable candidate for the role of Prime Minister, he still manages to fit in an impressive number of media appearances, public speaking engagements and constituency visits for your average backbencher. Tonight Rees-Mogg descended on the Boothroyd room in Portcullis House for a Conservative Voice event to share his thoughts on the state of his party. He criticised CCHQ for taking power away from local associations, praised the work of volunteers in the election campaign and called for a manifesto at the next election that would not be met with surprise by Tory members. Asked in the Q&A whether he would rule out entering

Should Theresa May reshuffle her Cabinet?

When Parliament returns tomorrow, Theresa May will come back to work to find her position a bit more secure than it was when she left for the summer break. With no obvious leadership challenger and her party vaguely united behind her, May looks safe in No 10 in the coming months – even if her claim that she could lead her party into another election looks dubious at best. It follows that talk has now turned to how she could shore up her position and assert her authority on her party. The Times reports that the prime minister and her allies are planning to use the threat of a reshuffle to further

The phoney Tory leadership war

When a new MP is offered a job as a parliamentary private secretary for a cabinet member, it’s often a test to see if they really would do anything to get into government. It involves running errands, spying on colleagues, ferrying messages around the Commons and planting inane questions for backbenchers to ask in the chamber. But in this hung Parliament, another duty has been added to those of the Tory PPS: to report anyone who might look as if they’re running for leadership. The Tory whips’ office has asked every PPS to inform them if any minister is behaving suspiciously — giving grand speeches about the state of the