Magpies have long been thought to be birds of omen. I am not superstitious. Yet during the election campaign I could not help but notice single magpies all the time. Perhaps you only notice what you are looking for, as from the beginning of the campaign the polls were clear that I would lose North East Somerset and Hanham. I wrote to my boarding school children when the election was called to warn them of the impending defeat, but unfortunately they cannot read my handwriting.
Throughout the campaign, the mood on the doorstep was excellent and the team full of beans. Many visitors came to help and I regularly had people staying overnight. This always makes elections fun, but there is less time for reading than you might expect. One of my sisters is giving me Jonathan Sumption’s wonderful and gripping multi-volume history of the Hundred Years War, and gave me another volume for my birthday in late May. I hoped to read it with six weeks at home in Somerset, but the exertions of canvassing made P.G. Wodehouse too tempting. So I went back to the Uncle Fred stories. Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, fifth Earl of Ickenham, is one of Wodehouse’s funniest creations and a great tonic after work.
People in Somerset are wonderfully good-natured, even those who would never vote for a Conservative, let alone me. It is a different world from the bile and ill temper of social media. We are a good-natured country and it is safe for politicians to walk about unaccompanied. This is a real strength of our democracy, and we must not allow the fake fury of the internet to influence us too much.
The Discovery Plus channel will be making a fly-on-the-wall documentary about my daily life. We had discussed but not agreed this before the election was called, so we urgently started some preliminary filming. This means I’m currently followed about by a film crew, which is an interesting experience. The individuals are delightful and usually pretty good at walking backwards carrying a camera (only one faller so far). Most of my children seem to enjoy it, especially Mary, who takes after my father’s mother, who was an actress. One day they filmed the house with a drone and the roof looked in reassuringly good nick. But a camera makes you realise the bits of the house that look shabby, as well as the ravaging effects of a dog and six children on soft furnishings.
In the last week of the election, my wife Helena took our four eldest children to Florence for their confirmations. They had to go to Florence for the ceremony to be carried out in the old rite as the Latin Mass is under heavy attack. It is apparently all the work of Cardinal Roche, a Yorkshire cleric who clearly has a chip on his shoulder. Possibly he failed his Latin O-level, as it is hard to explain his hostility otherwise. Florence is the base of the Institute of Christ the King, a flourishing traditional Catholic order. My nephew David has completed his first year and is now Abbé Rees-Mogg. It has a huge number of vocations and is growing rapidly. Perhaps the Latin Mass haters are envious – one of the Seven Deadly Sins – of its success.
Helena and I were planning to go to Glyndebourne on the evening after the election, but I knew I would be too tired to drive there and back that day. My goodness, they are helpful, happy to rearrange the tickets for a later date and entirely understanding. They even wished me luck – truly excellent service as it was my choice not to go and really not their problem. A less customer-focused organisation would simply have told me ‘bad luck’.
After so long in Somerset, it is always hard to drag myself back to London. It is an idyllic county and at this time of year the garden looks wonderful and the long evenings are beautiful. However, there is work to do, so I came back with three of the children. Helena brought two others and one is staying with friends. Although I do not want to leave, I’m always glad to be back and have GB News to prepare for – a moggologue on what went wrong for the Tories. I’m so lucky to have a platform and a job: sadly, I will have to make my parliamentary team redundant. They’re all brilliant, so if anyone needs hardworking, capable people, let me know. It is the one thing about losing my seat that I really mind.
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