Stephen Glover

The day Lord Rees-Mogg made me want to cry out in pain

The day Lord Rees-Mogg made me want to cry out in pain

If William Rees-Mogg had a fan club, I would be its president. I would lick envelopes for him and update his website, which would no doubt be full of his latest geopolitical prognostications. I would arrange coach parties of the faithful so that we could travel down to Somerset and glimpse him as he paced his grounds. I would organise seminars in which various ‘Mogg experts’ could unveil their latest theories about his work. There is virtually nothing I would not do for him.

Almost my first act on a Monday morning is to read his column in the Times. It is invariably a pleasure. William Rees-Mogg is an old-fashioned essayist who can turn to almost any subject under the sun, and write with knowledge and authority. This Monday, however, I was stopped in my tracks. His entire column was devoted to David Beckham. But it was not an ironic or a critical piece. Lord Rees-Mogg was disturbed by the prospect that Beckham might be leaving our shores for Real Madrid. It was ‘the great topic of the day’. Beckham had ‘exceptional gifts of being able to personify the Zeitgeist’. He drew a picture of a house in Cornwall in which various members of his family had passed the weekend discussing the possible consequences of Beckham going. He even compared Sir Alex Ferguson, Beckham’s manager, to Claudius, and Beckham to Hamlet, though the comparison did not entirely work since Sir Alex has not married Beckham’s mother. His conclusion was that if Beckham does go, England ‘will lose a much-loved hero’.

All this was written in Lord Rees-Mogg’s customary lapidary prose. My first thought was that it was a thin day for news, and that forgivably he had seized the only ball he could see and had run with it with plausible competence.

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