For reasons best known to myself, I decided to watch the first episode of Meet The Rees-Moggs not in the privacy of my own home, but with the crowd attending the official launch of the reality series at Warner Bros HQ in London (Warner is the owner of Discovery+, which is streaming the show). In a way, this was a mistake. At home, I would have been able to step away for minutes at a time, the better to despair and self-medicate. But on the plus side, maybe I’m just a little better prepared now for life in 21st-century Britain, a place in which some men will always be good chaps whatever they’ve done, and no one will ever have to go without prosciutto or mozzarella for more than a minute, irrespective of whether they voted for Brexit.
Simply everyone was there – the Express, Tatler Online – and oh, it was lavish. Champagne was served, and hacks were invited to make full use of the heaped Italian grazing boards that were all over the bar and every table (caper berries were go). “We may have met at the Broadcast awards,” I heard a random TV executive say, which gave me pause in the circumstances. But then we moved into the screening room – some brought their sun-dried tomatoes along, transported in handy little bamboo boats – and I began to see that an award-winning production was indeed on the cards. Talk about softball.
“I’ve been lucky enough to see the first two episodes,” said Matt Forde, the comedian who hosted a Q&A with the former Conservative MP and his heiress wife, Helena (this had to be done before the screening: Rees-Mogg was due at GB News, where he “presents” a show). He then praised the couple for their warmth, their comic timing, and their “really sweet” family black tie dinners, held weekly at their Somerset mansion. He also noted that while very few families have full-time, live-in nannies, the status of Veronica, aka Nanny, who joined the family before Jacob Rees-Mogg was born, now made “perfect sense” to him. Truly, there were no limits to his empathy. At the election, Rees-Mogg lost his seat. Was it, Forde wondered, inverted snobbery that did for the former Leader of the House of Commons? Even his interviewee thought this was a bit much. “No,” said JRM. “People just didn’t want the Tories to win.”
Journalists were not able to ask questions (no time!). So it was a relief to hear from Rees-Mogg himself that we would be seeing no one in a state of undress, and that bathrooms had been deemed out of bounds to the production team. Those worried about the Rees-Mogg children, their privacy invaded by their parents, should relax, we were also told. Their father dislikes privacy laws as much as he loathes some vegetables (onions, broad beans), and he hopes the show will simply reveal that politics can be fun. And then, the odd couple were gone. In the theatre, the silence that followed was palpable, though whether this was because people were full of focaccia or because they were amazed to have found themselves chuckling and supine in the face of a figure like Rees-Mogg, it was hard to tell. Personally, I felt slightly nauseous, in spite of the stony face I’d maintained throughout. But then, I always feel a bit peculiar in the presence of salami whose provenance is unknown.
Meet the Rees-Moggs is in six parts, and the action takes place both in London, and Somerset. When it begins, the 2024 election has just been called, and for the Mogg-ster, it’s action stations. Meanwhile, Helena must somehow keep the domestic show on the road, though of course she has many staff (in Somerset, where they have a huge mansion, two housekeepers, and a sweet man called Shaun who does everything from polishing the silver to making Rees-Mogg’s cider). The Rees-Moggs have six children. The older three (Peter, Mary and Thomas) are all at boarding school, but the younger ones (Anselm, Alfred and Sixtus) are still at home.
In the first episode, we meet four of them, and they’re predictably posh, and mostly likeable. They like M&S Peppa Pigs, horses, cricket, and Boris Johnson (“so fun”). And they dislike… hmm. Although highly trained, I detect some low-level rebelliousness at least in Sixtus, the baby of the family. At one point, his father tries to instruct him in the Catechism over lunch. When does the priest offer the Sacrament at Mass? he’s asked. “When he feels like it!” the kid yells.
Helena is rather droll: a bit like the posh French & Saunders characters who say “it’s just stuff and nonsense” at even the worst things (e.g. a leg falling off). “I’ll probably get a cease and desist from Johnny Boden,” she says, asked how she feels about her TV debut. Her eyes, you gather, are wide open: she knows how they look. She also knows the Tories are going to lose, and it’s up to her to prepare the family for this devastation: Anselm (or is it Alfred?) has never heard of anyone losing their job before.
And what of Rees-Mogg? The man from the Mirror who was sitting behind me emitted a loudly performative chortle when someone scrawled “POSH TWAT” on a Vote Conservative poster outside Rees-Mogg’s mother’s house (poor Shaun had to remove it). But I found it hard to laugh, not because I disagree exactly, but because this TV show, however risible it may be, is nevertheless still a reward for Rees-Mogg’s role in the huge and multifarious political failures of the last decade, as well as for his facile, not to say toxic, contribution to the public discourse. In any case, he seems to thrive on such insults. “Thank you!” he calls, when a bloke on a passing bike shouts: “We can’t wait [for you to lose]!”
What do we know now about him that we didn’t before? So far, the scoop comprises the fact that he loves Greggs, especially its chocolate eclairs, and that his housekeeper is expected to iron his boxers, and to use starch when she does (“he likes it quite stiff”). I think we were all aware that he is a devout Catholic, but perhaps we hadn’t grasped that on his Somerset estate, he has converted a barn into a chapel where specially invited priests conduct Mass for the whole family.
He also owns a collection of holy relics – and no, I’m not referring to something he picked up at the last sale of Mrs Thatcher’s belongings. We’re talking a spiky bit from the Crown of Thorns, a hair from the shirt of Thomas More, a fragment of the True Cross. Ugh. Was Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale considered too common to be taught at Eton? Non-conformist that I am, I may actually have moaned aloud at this point. But around me, no one else stirred – save, perhaps, to stab in the darkness at another olive with a recyclable fork.
[See also: Forty years ago, Band Aid brought mad excitement to my generation]
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