Mail Profile 2000

The following is the full text of an article appearing in the Mail on Sunday on 26 March 2000:

‘I do wish,’ said the Hon Jacob Rees-Mogg in slightly peevish tones, ‘you wouldn’t keep going on about my nanny.’ The 30-year-old prospective parliamentary candidate for the Wrekin in Shropshire, son of former Times editor Lord Rees-Mogg, rearranged his Flat Stanley form under the table at Claridges. ‘If I had a valet you’d think it was perfectly normal. Well,’ he concedes, catching my eye, ‘perhaps not.’ Until two years ago, Rees-Mogg employed a maid called Eleanor. Then – rather thoughtlessly – she went off and got married. Now the fund manager has to make do with his nanny, Veronica Crook, who famously canvassed for him when he stood as Tory candidate for the depressed constituency of Central Fife.

On one magnificent occasion two summers ago, both maid and nanny were to be found tending to their charge in the bucolic glory of Glyndebourne, where they took turns holding an open book over Rees- Mogg’s thin and pale neck to prevent it getting burned as he entertained a party of guests to a picnic.

Was this really true? ‘Oh, every bit of it. I hate sitting in the sun,’ he says. ‘So I complained to Nanny and she rellied round!’ The eccentric Rees-Mogg may, I suspect, be the last young British male to live as though he is in the 19th century.

Asked what his maid did, Rees-Mogg exclaims in his dizzy upper- crust drawl: ‘Well, everything! Cook! Make my breakfast! Take care of my clothes.

All the sort of things which somebody has to do!’ Most people managed these chores themselves, I observe. He considers this briefly. ‘Well, more fool them!’ So how did he manage without the maid? Did he make his own toast? ‘I don’t eat toast,’ he reports. ‘And I’m out a lot, and if I’m in I just have cheese and biscuits. I never have a hot meal if I have to make it for myself.

In fact, my oven’s been disconnected for the past three months. I think it’s frightfully funny. I think my younger sister, who lives with me, finds it a bit trying.’ What about his clothes?

‘Nanny makes sure they’re all reasonably clean. Life carries on.’ And he bursts into giggles.

In certain circles, Rees-Mogg is a cherished figure. Patriotic, self-deprecating and painfully polite, he treads an affable Mayfair beat between his Park Street house, Grosvenor Street office and club in St James’s. Thin as a coat hanger, apparently born in a Savile Row suit, he tools around town in a Bentley. Shy with girls, he orders from the waitress at Claridges with the assurance of someone to the manner born, and later insists, graciously, on paying for our drinks.

He was educated by a governess before attending Eton, where he toted a Harrods shopping bag with a ‘Vote Conservative’ sticker on it. At Trinity College, Oxford, he spent his time politicking at the Union, though he never made President like his dad. Nanny would come up once a week to make sure his rooms were spick and span. In this period, he also let rip his penchant for staff by employing a fellow student to type his letters, on the basis it was a ‘jolly boring’ thing to do.

He came down from Oxford and joined J Rothschild Investment Management for two years, then took his present job at Lloyd George Management, by whom he was posted for three years to Hong Kong. This is where he got his maid, under an obscure regulation that allows employees to be brought to England if they have worked for you for two years.

Although he has no known girlfriends, Rees-Mogg was spotted sombrely guiding Tara Palmer-Tomkinson round the dance floor at a recent Tory ball.

Very little ruffles his good humour. His surprisingly lively and eclectic group of friends discuss if he is deeply in character or ‘really like that’.

Wicked girls have been known to swear at him to see if he will be shocked, and his chum Louise Bagshawe, who immortalised him in her novel, Venus Envy, forbids him reading the work on the basis that it is too racy. Unabashed, Rees-Mogg glides serenely on.

The night before we met, he had been selected as the prospective parliamentary candidate for the Wrekin in Shropshire. He was very pleased as the seat, he thought, was winnable at the next election. It had a Labour majority of 3,025, but that was probably because of the uncharacteristic swing in 1997.

The selection panel presumably endorsed Rees-Mogg’s anti- European, low-taxation, gung-ho defence views, but it would be interesting to know if they were aware of their candidate’s quirky sense of humour. Despite coming across as fogeyish, Rees-Mogg delights in dabbling in the ‘yoof’ culture he has so rigorously eschewed for himself. In one priceless encounter, he glided on to Ali G’s spoof interview slot on Channel 4’s The 11 O’Clock Show to discuss class. ‘What makes a girl upper-class?’ Ali had enquired of his contemporary. ‘Is it things like she spits in a hankie? What if someone was so rich dey had a swimming pool, would dey be upper class?’ ‘What if you got busy with my sister?’Ali then went on.

‘I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting your sister,’ replied Rees- Mogg.

‘Ayeee, well, it can be arranged. She’ll be keen.’ If his sister had a child by Rees-Mogg, Ali said, what class would it be?

‘I think that speculating on my having a relationship with somebody I have never met, and that leading to a child being born, and then to what class it might be, is so farfetched as to be ridiculous,’ said Rees-Mogg stiffly.

But he is now tickled by the memory. ‘I thought it was frightfully funny,’ he says gaily, pouring himself some more coffee. ‘I just thought he was a nutter. I think his real sister, funnily enough, has just got married.’ What a lucky escape!

‘Or not,’ he says, ‘as the case may be.’ Since he was small, Rees- Mogg has seemed to be about 65. At eight, this heartbreakingly pale little boy was reading the Financial Times to follow his portfolio of stocks and shares.

(Nanny made him appointments to speak to his broker.) By 12 he had made a name for himself in the City, castigating the chairman of General Electric at a shareholders’ meeting for their ‘pathetic dividend’.

By then he was giving courteous interviews to the national press. When the late Jean Rook ventured into his presence in 1981, he informed her in a shatteringly high, sweet voice that he planned to be a millionaire at 21, a multimillionaire at 40, and Prime Minister at 70, ‘when I’ve made enough money to waste some on politics’.

Questioned by Rook about Thatcher’s monetarism, he predicted – correctly, it turned out – an upturn in the economy, concluding sagely: ‘Her policies won’t work, you’re thinking. Now that’s what everybody thinks. What people expect after any election is that everything will turn to gold. They forget that these things take a long time.’ Had he read the speculation about the Express’s financial future, Rook enquired? ‘Oh, the Express will be all right,’ opined her interviewee. ‘Free speech is important, we must keep all the papers we can. But new technology must eventually lead to staff cutbacks, of course. Still, I should think you’d be all right, wouldn’t you?’ While Rook lost her heart to this precocious oddity, the members of Downside public school were sufficiently infuriated to propose the motion: ‘This house would like to exterminate Jacob Rees- Mogg.’ At home, Jacob’s parents and four siblings thought his antics were hilarious. ‘He always sounds a frightful prig,’ remarked his mother, Gillian, ‘but really he’s enormous fun. He’s probably the one most like William.’ There are certainly similarities. Father and son both read history at Oxford, both were union hacks, both stood for unwinnable Tory seats, and both share an innate conviction that life is really rather jolly. While William edited the Times from 1967 to 1981 and went on to do a variety of great-and-good jobs at the BBC and Arts Council, before being made a life peer in 1988, his son is showing more of a political bent.

But then, this tendency has always been pronounced. When I tell Jacob I am astonished that he predicted the economic upturn of the mid to late Eighties, he says sheepishly: ‘I was very good on Tory propaganda as a 12-year-old.

Still am, in some respects.’ Rees-Mogg is the real-life and non- alcoholic equivalent of Brideshead Revisited’s Sebastian Flyte, who was also at Oxford, Catholic, and attached to his nanny. However, not even in the pages of Brideshead would Nanny have canvassed the forbidding council estates of Central Fife behind her master, who bounded Tiggerishly down the boarded-up streets, tackling youths with muscle-bound dogs and toothless pensioners.

‘But every other member of my family canvassed for me as well as Nanny,’ Rees-Mogg points out in a put-upon fashion. ‘I thought it was very funny. And I thought the press on it was very amusing, too.’ But why give such hostages to fortune? ‘He’s a very clever chap,’ one acquaintance remarked with perplexity. ‘He could have gone to the top. But he shoots himself in the foot with all this stuff about his nanny.’ His more sober friends are baffled as to why he does it. Some argue that it is buffoonery. Others think that he is too intelligent to take the political game as seriously as he should.

‘I am serious about it,’ their victim protests. ‘But I’m not an undertaker. I don’t think one should go round with a long face and pretend that life’s frightfully boring and that everyone’s the same. If I’ve got a nanny, I’ve got a nanny. And if anybody doesn’t like it – tough!’ But why did someone of 30 need a nanny? Wasn’t he a little old for that sort of thing?

‘There’s a difference,’ responds Rees-Mogg with dignity, ‘between need and making life more comfortable. Why should I make my life uncomfortable just so a few gossip columnists are deprived of their material? It would be so boring!’ But what does his Nanny do? ‘Well, if I have dinner parties, she cooks – when I’ve got an oven. And she washes, and all that sort of thing.’ I have been told about his dinner parties. They are white tie, and Rees-Mogg goes to huge trouble to look after his guests. The hitch comes at the end of the evening when he asks the girls to leave the men to their port. Rebellion inevitably ensues.

But Rees-Mogg is sublimely oblivious to such controversies. ‘I don’t see what the problem is!’ When I tell him the rest of us make do with cleaning ladies, if we are lucky, Rees-Mogg spectacularly misses the point. ‘So you don’t feel some moral imperative to do yourself, either?’ he cries. ‘So you’re in exactly the same position as I am!’ Veronica Crook is firmly in the mould of the old-fashioned nanny who stays with the family forever and does not marry or have children herself. Raised in Somerset, she is in her early fifties and lives with Rees-Mogg’s parents in London. ‘She’s been with the family for 35 years, so she’s been there longer than I have,’ observes her charge. Was she strict? ‘No, she’s always indulged us. She rellies round if anyone needs anything.’ When Rees-Mogg’s older brother Thomas had a baby, Veronica was on hand, and she helps with the other grandchildren. ‘I entered her for a Nanny of the Year competition three years ago,’ Rees-Mogg confides, ‘and she only came second, which I_hought was outrageous.’ He is unable to remain outraged for long, however. Soon he is waving his head and singing quietly to the strains of the band next door. ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?

I do.’ Isn’t he already? ‘I don’t think I am, actually,’ he reports in a dejected tone. ‘Rather disappointing.’ He is less forthcoming about his love life. He confirms that he has had girlfriends – or a girlfriend, it is not clear which. Is he seeing anyone at the moment? ‘No girl in their right mind would be the least bit interested.’ Palmer-Tomkinson is not a contender? ‘I think that would be hysterically funny. The idea that one of London’s stuffiest stuffed shirts should have a romantic liaison with an It lady is, regrettably, too absurd for words.’ But did he like her?_I thought she was absolutely lovely. She kindly came to the Tory ball where I organised a table. She was invited by a friend of mine. I was slightly worried about what I might meet, because obviously I’d read about her, but she was incredibly sweet-natured.’ Lord knows where he got his ideas about women from – possibly his favourite writer, PG Wodehouse. ‘One shouldn’t bandy ladies’ names around,’ he tells me. But I presume he doesn’t go out with vast numbers of girls? ‘Oh, no. I’m no great Casanova.’ Would he like to be? ‘Good Lord, no.

It would be far too expensive.’ He shows real enthusiasm at the prospect of getting married and having a large family – at present he spends most weekends with his own family, in Somerset. It is not clear how this outcome is to be achieved, as he never talks about emotions. ‘I’m not a touchy-feely type of person,’ he explains helpfully, ‘in case you hadn’t worked that out for yourself.’ But presumably he would, er, like to fall in love?

‘Yes, absolutely. But if I answer these questions too honestly, it gets one in terrible hot water later. If I say: “You probably have to make the right noises at the right time,” then some poor girl who reads this will think, “Oh Lord, I can’t see him, because when he says, “Dear old thing, I think you’re the bees knees”, he’ll actually be just doing it because he thinks it’s good form.”‘ I look at him closely, but he appears perfectly serious. Can anyone be capable of such total repression? What happens when he gets depressed?

‘Well, I don’t. If I get vaguely sort of green about the gills, I read PG Wodehouse.’ Which leads us on to his view that people who are fortunate, like him, should not complain. I ask mischievously if he would ever go into therapy. ‘God, no!’ he cries. Or have marriage guidance? But he surprises me there. ‘That wouldn’t be entirely up to me, would it? Er, I’m not a dictator.’ For now, Rees-Mogg will be heading for the Wrekin each weekend.

‘I’m glad to have got a country seat because I’m used to going to the country at weekends,’ he says. ‘It’ll now be Shropshire rather than Somerset.’ Will he win? I hope so. He will liven up the Commons no end.