Jacob Rees-Mogg
Sir Jacob William Rees-Mogg (born 24 May 1969) is a British politician and member of the Conservative Party serving as the Member of Parliament (MP) for North East Somerset since 2010. He served as Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council from 2019 to 2022, Minister of State for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency from February to September 2022 and Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy from September to October 2022. Rees-Mogg previously chaired the eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG) from 2018 to 2019 and has been associated with socially conservative views.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Office abolished
Constituency established
Constituency abolished
14,729 (26.2%)
24 May 1969
London, England
6
The Lord Rees-Mogg (father)
Annunziata Rees-Mogg (sister)
Rees-Mogg was born in Hammersmith, London. He was educated at Westminster Under School, Eton College and Trinity College, Oxford, where he read history and was president of Oxford University Conservative Association. He went on to work in the City of London and in Hong Kong for Lloyd George Management until 2007, when he co-founded the hedge fund management business Somerset Capital Management LLP.[2][3] He amassed a significant fortune, estimated in 2016 at between £55 million and £150 million, including his wife's expected inheritance.[4][5] Rees-Mogg unsuccessfully contested the 1997 and 2001 general elections before being elected as the MP for North East Somerset in 2010.[6] He was reelected in 2015 and 2017, with an increased share of the vote each time, as well as in 2019, with a smaller share of the vote. Within the Conservative Party, he has joined the traditionalist and socially conservative Cornerstone Group.
During the premiership of David Cameron, Rees-Mogg was one of the Conservative Party's most rebellious MPs, opposing the whips on a number of issues. He became known for filibustering.[7] A Eurosceptic, he proposed an electoral pact between the Conservatives and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and campaigned for the UK to leave the European Union in the 2016 referendum.[8] A member of the European Research Group (ERG), Rees-Mogg was elected its chairman in 2018.[9] He attracted support for his opposition to the Chequers Agreement and Prime Minister Theresa May's proposed Brexit withdrawal agreement. He was promoted as a potential successor to May as Leader of the Conservative Party; he instead endorsed Boris Johnson in the 2019 leadership contest.[10] Following Johnson's election as Conservative Leader and appointment as Prime Minister he appointed Rees-Mogg Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council. In February 2022, Rees-Mogg was moved by Johnson to the role of Minister of State for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency.[11] After Johnson resigned in July 2022, Rees-Mogg supported Liz Truss's bid to become Conservative leader. Following Truss's appointment as Prime Minister, she appointed Rees-Mogg as Business Secretary. He resigned as Business Secretary shortly after Truss left office on 25 October 2022.
Rees-Mogg has been described as a conviction politician with anachronistic attitudes.[12][13][14] Critics view him as a reactionary figure; his traditionalist attitudes have been characterised as obscuring controversial political views,[15][16][17][18] some of which have made him the target of organised protests. His anachronistic style has led to Mogg being dubbed the "Honourable Member for the 18th century".[19]
Life and career
Early life and education
Rees-Mogg was born in Hammersmith, London, on 24 May 1969, the younger son of William Rees-Mogg (1928–2012), who was editor of The Times newspaper, and made a life peer in 1988, and his wife Gillian Shakespeare Morris, formerly his secretary, daughter of Thomas Richard Morris, a lorry driver, car salesman, local government politician, and Conservative mayor of St Pancras in London. He is a descendent of the Rees-Mogg family of Cholwell, Cameley.[20] He is one of five children, having three elder siblings, Emma Beatrice Rees-Mogg (born 1962),[21] Charlotte Louise Rees-Mogg (born 1964)[21] and Thomas Fletcher Rees-Mogg (born 1966),[21] and one younger sister, Annunziata Mary Rees-Mogg (born 1979).[22]
In 1964 the family purchased Ston Easton Park, a country house near the village of Ston Easton in Somerset, where Rees-Mogg grew up attending weekly mass and Sunday school at the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Ghost, Midsomer Norton.[23] He started catechism in 1975 here under his governess and attended ordinary form mass.[24] A few years later, in 1978, the family moved to the nearby village of Hinton Blewett where they purchased The Old Rectory, a Grade II listed former rectory.[25] Living in Somerset, he regularly travelled to his family's second home in Smith Square, London, where he attended prep school at the private Westminster Under School.[26][27]
Growing up, Rees-Mogg was primarily raised by the family's nanny Veronica Crook, whom he describes as a formative figure.[28] Crook came to work for the family in 1965 to look after Rees-Mogg's older siblings, and later looked after Rees-Mogg's own children; in 2021 she had worked for the family for 56 years.[29][30][31]
At age nine he made his first Will and testament,[32] and at thirteen he opened a Coutts bank account. When Rees-Mogg was ten, he was left £50 by a distant cousin, and his father, on his behalf, invested in shares in the now-defunct General Electric Company (GEC). Rees-Mogg said this event was the beginning of his interest in stock markets. Having learned how to read company reports and balance sheets, he later attended a shareholders' meeting at GEC, where he voted against a motion because dividends were too low.[4] He subsequently invested in London-based conglomerate Lonrho, eventually owning 340 shares, and reportedly caused the company's chairman Lord Duncan-Sandys "discomfort" by quizzing him at an annual general meeting on the low dividends offered to shareholders. In 1981, at a shareholders' meeting of GEC, in which he owned 175 shares at the time, he told the chairman Lord Nelson that the dividend on offer was "pathetic", sparking amusement among board members and the media.[33]
After prep school, Rees-Mogg entered Eton College, where he was described in a school report as a "particularly dogmatic" Thatcherite.[34] Upon leaving Eton, he had his portrait painted by Paul Brason,[35] a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, for the Eton College Collections,[36] which was later put on display during the Faces of 1993 Royal Society of Portrait Painters exhibition.[37]
Rees-Mogg read history at Trinity College, Oxford, where he graduated with an upper second-class honours degree in 1991.[38][39] Almost immediately after arriving in 1988, he was nominated by Cherwell for the title of "Pushy Fresher", printing a photograph of open-mouthed Rees-Mogg in a suit with the caption "What more need we say?".[40] While at Oxford, he became president of the Oxford University Conservative Association with what Cherwell described as a "campaign for world domination and social adequacy". Rees-Mogg was a member and frequent debater at the Oxford Union and elected Librarian, but Damian Hinds defeated him for president of the Union.[41][42][40] Reflecting on his time at university, Rees-Mogg regretted not having studied Classics.[43]
Career
After graduating from Oxford in 1991, Rees-Mogg worked for J Rothschild Investment Management under Nils Taube before moving to Hong Kong in 1993[44] to join Lloyd George Management.[45][46] During his tenure in Hong Kong, he became a close friend of its Governor Chris Patten and was a regular at Government House. Three years later, he returned to London and was put in charge of some of the firm's emerging markets funds. By 2003, he was managing a newly established Lloyd George Emerging Markets Fund.[47] In 2007, Rees-Mogg left the company with a number of colleagues to set up their own fund management firm, Somerset Capital Management,[48] with the aid of hedge fund manager Crispin Odey. Following Rees-Mogg's election as a Member of Parliament, he stepped down as chief executive of the company; however, he continues to receive income in his capacity as a partner.[44]
In 2018, Somerset Capital opened an investment fund in Dublin in order to be legally able to continue to have European retail investors after Brexit. The new business prospectus listed Brexit as one of the risks, as it could cause "considerable uncertainty". Rees-Mogg, who remains a partner of the business but does not manage the funds nor make investment decisions, stated: "The decision to launch the fund was nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit."[49]
Rees-Mogg's wealth has been estimated to be in excess of £100 million when combined with his wife's expected inheritance, which, according to The Guardian, has left him open to the criticism that he cannot understand the lives and concerns of many ordinary people.[50][51] When interviewed by Channel 4 in March 2019, Rees-Mogg declined to answer suggestions that their calculations showed that he could have earned £7 million in the period since the referendum.[52][53] In July 2019, Rees-Mogg resigned from his part-time role at Somerset Capital Management following his appointment as Leader of the House of Commons.[54]
Parliamentary candidate and other roles
Rees-Mogg first entered politics at the 1997 general election at which, aged 27, he was selected as the Conservative Party candidate for Central Fife, a traditional Labour seat in Scotland. With an upper class background on his father's side set against a predominantly working-class electorate, and having been described as being "so posh, it's as if he has been transported in time from a previous century",[55] he caused some bewilderment among locals by canvassing the area with his family's nanny and touring the constituency in a Bentley, a claim that he later described as "scurrilous", stating it had been a Mercedes.[56][38] With a name recognition of less than 2%,[57] Rees-Mogg received 9% of the votes cast, a figure much lower than that of previous Conservative Party candidates for the area. However, no new Conservative MPs were elected in Scotland that year; the Conservative Party suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1906, and lost all its seats in Scotland.
In 1999, when it was being rumoured that his "anachronistically posh" accent was working against his chances of being selected for a safe Conservative seat, Rees-Mogg was defended by letter writers to The Daily Telegraph, one of whom claimed that "an overt form of intimidation exists, directed against anyone who dares to eschew the current, Americanised, mode of behaviour, speech and dress".[58] Rees-Mogg himself stated (in The Sunday Times, 23 May 1999) that "it is rather pathetic to fuss about accents too much", though he then went on to say that "John Prescott's accent certainly stereotypes him as an oaf",[58] a comment which he later said he regretted and for which he apologised.[59] He later said: "I gradually realised that whatever I happened to be speaking about, the number of voters in my favour dropped as soon as I opened my mouth."[60]
Rees-Mogg was selected as the Conservative candidate for The Wrekin in Shropshire for the 2001 general election, but lost to the sitting Labour MP Peter Bradley.[61] From 2005 to 2008, he was the elected Chairman of the Cities of London and Westminster Conservative Association.[62]
In 2006, Rees-Mogg criticised efforts by then-Leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron to increase the representation of ethnic minorities on the party candidate list, arguing that fulfilling quotas can often "make it harder for the intellectually able" and that "Ninety-five per cent of this country is White. The list can't be totally different from the country at large."[63]
In March 2009, Rees-Mogg was forced to apologise to Trevor Kavanagh, the then political editor of The Sun, after it was shown that a newsletter signed by Rees-Mogg had plagiarised sections of a Kavanagh article that had appeared in the newspaper over a month earlier.[64]
In December 2009, a pamphlet which purported to show him talking to a local constituent and calling on the government to "show more honesty" was criticised after it emerged that the "constituent" was a London-based employee of his investment firm.[65]
He was one of the directors of the Catholic Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in London who were ordered to resign by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor in February 2008 after protracted arguments over the adoption of a tighter ethical code banning non-Catholic practices such as abortions and gender reassignment surgery at the hospital.[66]
Media
Rees-Mogg appeared on The 11 O'Clock Show in 1999, where he was interviewed by Ali G, who called him "Lord Rees-Mogg" and attempted to talk about social class.[247]
In October 2017, Rees-Mogg presented talk radio station LBC's morning show for a day, where he discussed Brexit, foreign policy and the T-charge with callers, including Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable. Rees-Mogg was praised for his sense of charm and humour.[248] He returned to present a Sunday show on LBC in February 2018.[249]
Rees-Mogg has his own dedicated podcast known as 'The MoggCast', which, in association with ConservativeHome, features him discussing a wide array of current events on a fortnightly basis.[250]
On 15 July 2017, he joined Twitter, writing in Latin: Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis. ("The times change, and we change with them").[251] He also uses Instagram and other social media.[252]
In January 2023, Rees-Mogg was announced to be joining GB News as a host and presenter.[253] In the 9 May episode of State of the Nation Rees-Mogg covered a breaking news story about a civil trial verdict involving Donald Trump. The media regulator Ofcom received 40 complaints. In July 2023 Ofcom announced that they were investigating whether the episode broke their rules on preventing politicians from acting as newsreaders.[254]