It was only a matter of time before the big dogs of the recently defeated Conservative Party started cropping up on reality TV. The producers of The Traitors are reportedly desperate to get Liz Truss sitting at the round table, Rishi Sunak is tipped by bookies to enter the Celebrity Big Brother house and Suella Braverman might be donning her jungle boots later this year (despite the latter two retaining their seats).
But first out the gate is the ghost of Christmas past himself, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Discovery+ has signed him up for a fly-on-the-wall TV series that is, according to The Sun, being sold as “the British version of The Kardashians”.
Meet the Moggs will give a never-before-seen look into his life at home in the 17th-Century Somerset house where he lives with his wife and children, so says a Discovery+ press release. Filmed throughout his re-election campaign (which we now know was unsuccessful – Rees-Mogg lost his seat to Labour’s Dan Norris in their constituency of North East Somerset and Hanham), the “documentary” series will give insight into what working life is really like for a politician as well as his role as a husband and father. “This everyday story of Somerset folk is fun to film but may be a bit more Fawlty Towers than Downton Abbey,” says Rees-Mogg. What larks!
I can hear you sighing already. But wait – aren’t you at least a little bit curious as to what Jacob Rees-Mogg – a man who looks and acts as though he should be permanently wearing a top hat and always carrying a cane – does in his spare time? I know I am.
Rees-Mogg has fascinated me and repulsed me in equal measure ever since he was first elected in 2010. Our politics could not be more different – he thinks abortion should be completely banned, he has a firm anti-immigration stance, he was a huge supporter of Brexit, he’s questioned the science of climate change, and he is against same-sex marriage. In 2017 he told LBC that he found food banks “rather uplifting”. He’s a staunch traditionalist, so stuck in the past that he’s earned himself the nickname “the Honourable Member for the 18th century”. In the same way that Donald Trump and Nigel Farage’s despicableness makes them perfect news fodder, Rees-Mogg’s antiquity and, well, oddness will make for engrossing television.
But it’s not necessarily his politics and his (now ex) job that make Rees-Mogg particularly interesting. It’s his lifestyle I want to poke around in. He lives in Gournay Court in Somerset, which looks as grand as it sounds, with his wife Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair, who is as posh as she sounds (her heiress mother has an estimated fortune of £45 million). A Catholic, he has six children whose names are as follows: Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher, Mary Anne Charlotte Emma, Alfred Wulfric Leyson Pius, Thomas Wentworth Somerset Dunstan, Anselm Charles Fitzwilliam, and Peter Theodore Alphege (who apparently takes centre stage of the series, keen to kick-start his own TV career).
Who doesn’t want to see this lot eating a pheasant supper straight from the Aga while reciting Latin poems in a wood-panelled dining room decorated with portraits of Boris Johnson and Margaret Thatcher?
Of course, we must watch Meet the Moggs with our wits about us. Just as Farage and Matt Hancock hoped I’m a Celeb would warm them to the public (and to a certain extent, it did), Rees-Mogg will be expecting viewers to fall for his “I’m actually a very good dad” schtick and forget all about the time he admitted he had never changed a nappy (“The nanny does it brilliantly!”). A source has already told The Sun that the film crew have been surprised by the former MP’s “kind and warm” personality. Don’t be shocked when he eventually crowbars his newfound status as a TV personality back into being a politics heavyweight.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to deny that Rees-Mogg and his clan of poshos will make for some excellent television. As long as we don’t allow him to creep into our good graces just because we watched him take his son to cricket after fending off Beth Rigby on Sky News, Meet the Moggs will only serve to further other him from the everyday lives of normal Brits.
While millions of families scrape by, seeing the splendour in which Rees-Mogg lives will hopefully further entrench the idea that these people – who cannot relate to the struggles ordinary folk are facing in any real tangible way – should not be in government. Good, I say. Let him dig his own grave. On TV.