Review
Meet the
Rees-Moggs review – my obsession with Jacob’s wife runs deep
There are
surprisingly appealing domestic scenes as Jacob learns slang and poo jokes from
his six children … but there’s no denying who the real star is here
Lucy Mangan
Mon 2 Dec
2024 06.00 GMT
I often feel these days that I am going
bonkers. Or that I am staying sane while the world goes bonkers around me,
which amounts to the same thing. It is getting to the point where I will almost
miss being disoriented if it ever stops.
There is no
danger of that, however, for as long as Meet the Rees-Moggs exists. Yes, it is
a reality show about the former Tory MP for North East Somerset, once described
as “a haunted Victorian pencil”, Jacob Rees-Mogg, his wife, Helena, and their
six children. “We had to try five times before we got one who looked like me,”
says Helena, and she is right. Helena, I hazard a guess, is always right.
Do you know
what I would do if I were a rich politician, had married an aristocratic
heiress who was even richer, and had a lovely life split between a large house
in London and a vast family pile for my massive family in Somerset? Not sign up
to a reality show like an absolute berk, that’s what.
The why of
it is a compelling question. On the one hand, a lust for fame does not jibe
with what we know of poshos. On the other hand, anyone who puts together a
persona as carefully as Jacob has over the years – and he is his own pastiche –
is hardly someone not crying out for attention. Perhaps he thinks the show will
do for him what appearing on Have I Got News for You did for Boris Johnson back
in the day – make enough of the public fall for the act, and rise to power on
that misbegotten popularity. If it works, we’ll deserve it.
Once the
show begins, however, the why fades to a background hum as the Rees-Moggery
begins. Contrary to expectations, Jacob seems overtly fond of and engaged with
his children (three at home, three at boarding school). His daughter, Mary,
says she often teaches him slang to amuse herself. “So,” we hear him ask her
later at the dinner table, “‘wasteman’ is not rizz?” I’m not sure Helena gives
any of her brood a thought if they are not in her eyeline, which I admire
tremendously.
Jacob holds
a wheelbarrow full of apples, with (from left) Sixtus, Jacob, Mary, Helena,
with Jacob’s election agent and PA Margaret, as they make cider
Helena
quickly becomes the star of the show. The general election is announced. “The
mood in the country,” she says, without moving her lips or jaw, “is
anti-Conservative. Possibly with some justification, unfortunately.” It’s
incredible. The words get out, but you cannot see how. The birthday of their
fourth (I think) child, Anselm, falls on the day of Boris Johnson’s 60th
birthday party, to which they are all going. Helena wonders if Anselm might
want to do something in addition. Go-karting, he suggests. Helena computes this
and agrees. Later, she preps the children for the likely outcome of the
election. “Other careers are available.” Her wit is so dry it leaves you
feeling sandpapered. I think she may become my new obsession.
The
Rees-Moggs’ Catholicism is covered. “I’m very lucky to have my own chapel,”
says Jacob, but there are plenty of truthful and non-risible remarks about the
faith, too, plus an oddly endearing discussion with the children when one
wonders whether transubstantiation isn’t a bit like, you know, cannibalism?
Their
courtship is covered. She knew him as her friend Annunziata’s brother. He knew
her as a descendant of one of his greatest political heroes, Thomas Wentworth.
He told her all about him. “I staggered away after about 20 minutes,” says
Helena (somehow, I still haven’t caught her in the act of enunciating). Before
their first date, he tried to buy a book on Wentworth to give her, but it
wasn’t in stock. So he bought her a pair of earrings instead – a move that
suggests a degree of spontaneity in the Moggsian mind that is otherwise
invisible. They both wanted lots of children, and that was that. Theirs is
clearly a love match, though the L-word is never mentioned. His face lights up
when she talks and especially when she teases him.
But the
unexpectedly appealing scenes of their domestic life (yes, replete with staff
and everything else you would have if you were sitting on a fortune, but also
with children making jokes about poo, and Helena, to whom I have pledged
allegiance by the end of episode two, delivering brutal apercus at every turn)
contrast with interviews with people such as David Leverton. He is on the
streets campaigning in the run-up to the election against Mogg and urging
tactical voting to get him out. “Almost everything he stands for is bad,” he
says, of the anti-abortion, pro-Brexit, anti-immigration MP. “He seems to
despise people who are poorer [than he is] – which is almost all of us.” It is
more than the Have I Got News for You team threw at Johnson. Whether it is
enough to counteract the idiosyncratically charming picture painted elsewhere,
we will have to wait and see.
Meet the Rees-Moggs is on Discovery+ now.
