Let’s keep up the Moggmentum

‘We need to talk about why the internet is falling in love with Jacob Rees-Mogg, because it’s not OK,’ warns a recent post on the Corbynista website The Canary. Its anxiety is not misplaced. Polite, eloquent, witty, well-informed, coherent, principled — Jacob Rees-Mogg is the antithesis of almost every-thing the Labour party stands for under its current populist leadership. And far from putting off voters, it seems to be a winning formula. Even sections of the elusive and generally very left-wing youth vote appear to be warming to the idea that our next prime minister shouldn’t be (alleged) man-of-the-people Corbyn but yet another plummy, Old Etonian millionaire…

This ought to make no sense at all. If there’s one lesson the Conservative party’s strategists have learned from Jeremy Corbyn’s performance in the polls — at the time of writing he has an eight-point lead — it’s that Britain has had enough of conservatism. Actually, the word they use is ‘austerity’ but it amounts to the same thing. So widespread is the panic in the party that even its more fiscally responsible luminaries are coming round to the idea that, from university tuition to the NHS, the only way to beat Corbyn is to talk and spend like socialists.

But not The Mogg. He made his position perfectly clear (as he always does) in a response to a potentially tricky question last week on BBC Question Time. ‘Does the panel agree with David Cameron that it is selfish to give the public sector a pay rise?’ This would have stumped most Tory politicians, preying as it does on their greatest fear, that someone some day might catch them out saying something that sounds uncaring.

The Mogg, however, did not flinch. Patiently, lucidly, authoritatively he set out the terms of the issue: in 2010, the Tories had inherited from Labour a £150 billion deficit, which meant that they had no choice but to make decisions which were ‘difficult and unpopular’.