The star of the BBC's documentary series, The House of Commons, has been the MP for North Somerset. He is known in parliament as the 'member for the C18th' and I've rarely seen anybody happier in their work, gleefully filibustering to deliberately subvert the work of the democratic process, glorying in arcane procedure and checking his speeches in the draft of Hansard to correct any errata and re-enjoy the flow his own 'mellifluous' prose. Although apparently very self-conscious, he is either blissfully unaware of the absurdity of it all or, more likely, he relishes it.Jacob Rees Mogg might be regarded as a throwback to a bygone age but which age that exactly was is hard to say, and perhaps there has always been a vogue for fogeyism that he would have followed whatever age he had lived in. If you think you've seen him somewhere before, it might be Cuthbert Cringeworthy you are thinking of, the swot in The Bash Street Kids.
Of course, I'm not a devoted fan and I'd be reluctant to vote for his euro-sceptic and other right-wing principles if there was a sack of gravel standing against him but his quaint demeanour, intense desire to express himself in carefully considered, grammatically correct sentences sets him apart from his colleagues, the sinister Michael Gove and the equally unpleasant George Osborne whose role seems to be to make David Cameron look statesmanlike. And they do.
I was lucky enough to catch an old Have I Got News for You on Dave last night and I was impressed by Jacob's performance. He remained demure and unflappable in the company of Jo Brand, Hislop, Merton and Kevin Bridges. He raised his eyebrows a lot, looked about a little nervously but, honestly, it didn't look as if he knew what Jo was talking about most of the time. He might not know much about gangsta rap but he knew all the stuff about Westminster. He is infinitely preferable to the bluster and bombast of Boris and his innate sense of entitlement inures him against any criticism of unworldliness, Old Etonian privilege or downright weirdness. That is all a part of the act. And it is probably not even an act, not a bit of it.
The BBC programme highlighted the great ovation accorded to Ed Miliband by the Conservative members whenever he enters the Commons, it being their way of indicating that he is their greatest electoral asset. The Labour Party could do worse than reply with posters featuring Gove, Osborne and Rees Mogg if the election campaign is to be as negative as expected.
But Jacob's devotion to Westminster and the political process is likely to mean that we don't get to see enough celebrity appearances. He is probably not going to follow the populist strategy of Boris, for who (and Jacob would say 'for whom', I dare say) any and every publicity stunt is the air that he breathes. Both model themselves on classical templates but from very different positions. Jacob's studied antiquity is a fine and elegant thing whereas Boris is boorish, muddled and incoherent. And so it is unlikely that, if I were to become controller of BBC1, I could realize my ambition of replacing the dull, ex-pro pundits on Match of the Day with a panel of Jacob Rees Mogg and John Cooper-Clarke.
