[ad_1]
i I often feel like I’m going crazy these days. Or that I stay sane while the world goes crazy around me, which is the same thing. It’s getting to the point where I’ll almost miss being disoriented if it ever stops.
There is no danger of that, however, as long as Meet the Rees-Moggs exists. Yes, it’s a reality show about the former Tory MP for North East Somerset, once described as a “spooky Victorian pencil”. Jacob Rees-Mogghis wife Helena and their six children. “We had to try five times before we found one that looked like me,” says Helena, and she’s right. Helena, I venture to guess, is always right.
Do you know what I would do if I were a rich politician, married an aristocratic heiress who was even richer, and had a wonderful life split between a big house in London and a huge family pile for my huge family in Somerset? Not signing up for a reality show like an absolute moron, that’s what.
Why is this a compelling question. On the one hand, the lust for glory does not match what we know about poshos. Then again, anyone who has crafted a persona as carefully as Jacob has over the years — and he’s his own style — is hardly someone who isn’t 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 – get enough of the public to fall for the act and rise to power with that misguided popularity. If it works, we’ll deserve it.
Once the show starts though, why does it fade to a background hum when the Rees-Moggery kicks in. Contrary to expectations, Jacob seems to openly love and engage with his children (three at home, three at boarding school). His daughter Mary says she often teaches him slang for fun. “So,” we hear him ask her later at the dinner table, “‘wilderness’ isn’t a shirt?” I’m not sure Helena thinks about any of her offspring if they’re not in her line of sight, which I admire it immensely.
Helena quickly becomes the star of the show. The general election has been announced. “The mood in the country,” she says without moving her lips or jaw, “is anti-conservative. Probably with some justification, unfortunately. It’s incredible. The words come out, but you can’t see how. The birthday of their fourth (I think) child Anselm falls on the day of Boris Johnson’s 60th birthday, which everyone goes to. Helena wonders if Anselm might want to do something extra. Karting, he suggests. Helena considers this and agrees. Later, she prepares the children for the likely outcome of the election. “There are other careers available.” Her wit is so dry it makes you feel smug. I think she might become my new obsession.
Rees-Moggs’ Catholicism is covered. “I’m very lucky to have my own chapel,” says Jacob, but there are also plenty of truthful and unfunny observations about faith, plus a weirdly nice discussion with the kids where you wonder if transubstantiation is a bit like, you know, cannibalism?
Their courtship is covered. She knew him as the brother of her friend Annunziata. He knew her as a descendant of one of his greatest political heroes, Thomas Wentworth. He told her all about him. “I staggered after about 20 minutes,” says Helena (somehow I still haven’t caught her in the act of pronouncing it). Before their first date, he had tried to buy a book about Wentworth to give her, but it was out of stock. So he buys 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 kids and that was it. Theirs is clearly a love match, although the L-word is never mentioned. His face lights up when she talks and especially when she teases him.
But the unexpectedly endearing scenes of their home life (yes, complete with staff and everything else you’d have if you were sitting on a fortune, but also with kids making poo jokes and Helena, who I’ve fallen for in faithfulness to the end from episode two, providing a brutal apercus at every turn) contrasted with interviews with the likes of David Leverton. He’s on the streets campaigning in the run-up to the election against Mogg and calling for a tactical vote to get him out. “Almost everything he stands for is bad,” he says of the anti-abortion, pro-Brexit and anti-immigration MP. “He seems to despise people who are poorer [than he is] — which is pretty much all of us.” That’s more than the Have I Got News for You crew threw at Johnson. We’ll have to wait and see if it’s enough to counter the idiosyncraticly charming picture painted elsewhere.
[ad_2]
