Jacob rees-mogg

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

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s war on Whitehall continues apace. The Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency has embraced his new role with relish, firing off notes to officials refusing to return to the office and launching his new ‘EU law dashboard’. But it’s his intention to trim the size of the state which has caused most upset among the Sir Humphreys of SW1, with Rees-Mogg pledging to cut the civil service headcount back to where it was before the pandemic. That would mean 91,000 job cuts: a figure that was briefed to the Daily Mail, which splashed on the story on Friday 13 May. This announcement, via the media, angered many

Ah, Jacob Rees-Mogg. The Old Etonian sometimes appears to have been designed by top lab scientists at CCHQ to perfectly antagonise the Sir Humphreys of SW1. Since his appointment as the Minister for Government Efficiency in February, every announcement by the Somerset MP seems calculated to enrage the civil service trade unions, keen to retain Covid-era hybrid working practices. For the Moggstar has been on a one-man war around Whitehall, rampaging around the Cabinet Office, decrying those mandarins who stubbornly refuse to abandon working from home. As part of this crusade to get back to the offices, Rees-Mogg last month toured his department and left calling cards on the empty desks of absent

Boris Johnson has never quite been able to decide whether he wants to be a great unifier or a great divider. Does he want to govern like he did at City Hall – the ‘generous-hearted, loving mayor of London’, as he once described himself – or is his best chance for re-election a return to the Brexit-style wars that landed him in Downing Street? These days, there are plenty of signs that the government is in fight mode. The Prime Minister is risking a trade war with Brussels with threats to unilaterally rewrite the Northern Ireland Protocol, going to battle with civil servants over home-working and planning to deport asylum

Jacob Rees-Mogg has been out and about making the most of his new role. Appointed minister for government efficiency in last month’s reshuffle, the Somerset MP was quick to announce his plans for the brief: a cut of least 65,000 civil servants to shrink Whitehall to the size it was pre-pandemic. The former leader of the Commons also plans to personally review every new vacant post to see if it should be filled. News of a mandarin crackdown will be welcomed by many in Rees-Mogg’s party, hungry for a diet of red meat after months of Tory drift. But will special advisers be included in the planned bonfire of the

Whether it’s online, print, radio or broadcast, it seems we can’t get enough of politics these days. And not content with traditional forms of media, an ever-expanding number of MPs are branching out into podcasts to share their thoughts with the wider world. Around half-a-dozen have launched their own shows in recent months, following in the footsteps of perhaps the most high-profile parliamentary podcaster: Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has hosted his fortnightly Moggcast show for ConservativeHome since 2018, often providing news lines which Mr S is only too keen to follow up. The latest ambitious MP to launch such a project is the chisel-jawed Luke Evans, whose career reads like a

Jacob Rees-Mogg is now arguing that the UK system has become so presidential that a new prime minister would feel obliged to call an election. The message to Tory MPs is clear: depose Boris Johnson and you’ll be going to the country in months — and do you really want to do that given the polls? Rees-Mogg’s argument is being used by the shadow whipping operation too. It has, from what I have been hearing, had some effects on new intake MPs. But among older intakes, there is a bit of a backlash to it.  There is a view that the argument takes them for fools. Yes, Labour and the

You know it’s bad when Rees-Mogg does the media round. Ever since his disastrous interview on Grenfell in the 2019 election, Tory party managers have been keen to keep the Old Etonian’s performances on national television to a minimum. But given both the dire straits in which Boris now finds himself and the half-hearted backing of his cabinet, it was cometh the hour, cometh the Mogg. And the leader of the Commons certainly brought the House down.  First Mogg went on LBC to dismiss those calling for Johnson to quit, claiming ‘The people who have come out so far are people like Roger Gale and Douglas Ross who never supported the

Tory backbenchers have had an uncomfortable relationship with face masks since they were brought in last year. Spectators in the Commons chamber are greeted by the sight of many more Labour MPs preferring to wear the coverings than their Conservative counterparts, with some of the latter relishing the divide as the fundamental difference between their two parties. But that reluctance for masks gave Sajid Javid an awkward moment at yesterday’s No. 10 press conference. After Sebastian Payne of the Financial Times pointed out to the Health Secretary that Tory MPs not wearing mask risked undermining government messaging and risked leaving them open to charges of hypocrisy, a squirming Javid said: I think

Greeted by a throng of angry protesters outside Tory conference, some of the party’s MPs are taking the easy option – and choosing to walk a different way. But not Jacob Rees-Mogg.  After leaving the conference centre, Mogg – dressed immaculately, as usual, in his buttoned-up suit – walked straight into the thick of it. He might have regretted his decision.  Mogg was booed loudly and heckled by demonstrators, with one calling him ‘scum’. Here’s the video: Having headed through the crowd of demonstrators, Mogg then turned back and ran the gauntlet again – only this time to be confronted by an angry protester who blamed the Tories for not being

In recent months Jacob Rees-Mogg has kept a low profile in Westminster. The leader of the House is kept mainly these days to the confines of managing parliamentary business with the mile-long ‘Mogg conga’ queuing system last June being one of the few occasions he has returned to the limelight. So Mr S was delighted to see the Old Etonian demonstrate he has lost none of his wit or wisdom when he came to the Commons today to field questions from backbenchers. A question by Ipswich Tom Hunt MP decrying the ‘wokeification’ of British universities offered Rees-Mogg the chance to offer his thoughts on Churchill college Cambridge potentially rebranding, 150 Oxford academics refusing

Boris Johnson has launched his party’s manifesto in Telford this afternoon, joined by his Cabinet who were all confidently clapping away in the front row. All of them, that is, except for one Jacob Rees-Mogg. Eagle-eyed viewers will have spotted the conspicuous absence of the Leader of the Commons. Mr Rees-Mogg has been keeping a low profile after committing the first major blunder of the election campaign. During a discussion with LBC’s Nick Ferarri, the MP for North Somerset said that he thought that it would have been ‘the common sense thing to do’ for Grenfell residents to have ignored the fire brigade’s advice and leave the burning building. So

In the London Review of Books this month, James Meek wrote a long article about Jacob Rees-Mogg and his ‘curious duality’ in being both a high Catholic, fogey Brexiteer and a founder of Somerset Capital Management, which the author sees as globalist and ruthless. The piece is elegantly done, but entirely sneery. It makes not the slightest attempt to enter into the Mogg’s (or any Brexiteer’s) mind with any sympathy. I was thinking about this because the LRB’s publicity emphasised that Meek is an Orwell Prize winner. How we need an Orwell on the subject of Brexit. Although he came from a declaredly socialist view, he understood what it is — to use

“What is going on with the conference recess?” asked Valerie Vaz during Jacob Rees-Mogg’s first outing for Business Questions as Leader of the House. She sounded exasperated, and who can blame her? After all, it was the sixth week in a row she asked the question. And it was the sixth week that she was fobbed off. So what is going on? Normally conference recess dates are bundled together with the dates of other recesses and tabled earlier in the parliamentary session. In 2018, the recesses for the forthcoming summer, conference, November and Christmas were approved on March 20th. In 2017, summer and conference went together on June 22nd (after