On display inside Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg’s untidy office are three large portraits: Sir Winston Churchill, Boris Johnson and himself.
They hang from cream-coloured wallpaper behind a cluttered wooden desk at the centre of the HQ for Sir Jacob’s uphill campaign to win the North East Somerset and Hanham constituency – his fifth straight term in the area.
“Boris went up when he became leader... we always had the leader up,” says Sir Jacob, looking up at the pictures. “Then Covid came and we’ve hardly used the office since.”
No Liz Truss, then. But what about Rishi Sunak, will he get his place next to Churchill?
‘Um... well, we will eventually,” Sir Jacob says, with a wry smile. “We’ll see how much we need it after the election, when he’s returned comfortably as PM. Yes, absolutely.”
It’s 17 days to polling day on 4 July and I’m in Keynsham, on the edge of Bristol, following Sir Jacob’s general election campaign.
Hidden down an alleyway between Bargain Booze and a local solicitor’s firm, it’s a struggle at first to find the office (I initially mistake it for the former Keynsham and District Conservative Club, where early-morning drinkers are sipping their first pint) but I get there eventually.
Boxes of delivery leaflets cover most of the carpeted floor while the chairs and the steep stairwell are filled with around eight friendly members sipping coffee and chatting before the day’s canvassing.
“The national polls... you know, we don’t read those,” says Margaret Brewer, Sir Jacob’s upbeat agent, with the latest poll from Ipsos projecting the worst post-war result for the Tory party.
Suddenly, Sir Jacob appears at the doorway wearing a dark grey double-breasted suit with a large blue rosette.
We shake hands before he picks an issue up with his agent. The local BBC channel is planning an election debate, and he’s concerned the Green Party candidate has not been invited.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” he says, showing genuine concern, before heading outside to discuss the plan for the day in private.
Sir Jacob was elected MP for North East Somerset 14 years ago. It’s a constituency he’s comically described as circling the city of Bath – where Lib Dem Wera Hobhouse was previously MP – like dough around the jam in a doughnut.
But his political rite of passage came in 1997 when he was parachuted into a virtually unwinnable seat for the Tory party in Central Fife. A quick search online reveals pictures of the smartly dressed 27-year-old knocking on working-class doors.
“There was no Bentley, sadly,” Sir Jacob laughs, correcting subsequent media coverage as he fondly recalls the campaign. “I’d knock on people’s doors and say, ‘I’m Jacob Rees-Mogg, I’m the Conservative candidate, can I count on you for your support?’
“More often than not, people would laugh ... they did think it was very funny that a Tory was asking for their vote.”
Fast forward 27 years, and electoral campaigning for Sir Jacob remains “very similar” – although in Longwell Green, where we are heading for canvassing today, the reception is likely to be different.
The pretty urban suburb on the edge of east Bristol has a strong Conservative following – five out of the six local councillors are Tories – which Sir Jacob wants to cement ahead of the general election.
And unlike on the Central Fife campaign, there’s no family nanny, Veronica Crook, in tow while knocking on doors – although his mother, Lady Gillian Rees-Mogg, does show up in the afternoon to help in the office.
It takes eight minutes to drive from Keynsham to Longwell Green, where it doesn’t take long to spot the lanky figure of Sir Jacob talking to a woman in a cul-de-sac, or his smart Jaguar XJL parked nearby.
This is a leafy area with a modern housing estate of large semi-detached homes, many with pristine front gardens. With the sun out, many residents are busy mowing lawns and cutting hedges.
The area, like the neighbouring wards of Bitton and Hanham, will join the old North Somerset constituency as part of boundary changes at the election.
But polling isn’t looking good for Sir Jacob.
Labour’s Dan Norris, mayor of the West of England and former MP for the seat, is projected to win comfortably, with 42 per cent of the vote according to Survation’s MRP, followed by Sir Jacob on 27 per cent, Lib Dems on 14 per cent and Reform UK with 12 per cent.
Mr Norris’s election leaflet features a “Stop Rees-Mogg” stamp. “Absolutely delighted that he’s advertising me,” says Sir Jacob.
Sir Jacob accepts the national polls are “not encouraging reading for the Conservatives”, but he urges caution at “an extrapolation of a national poll into a constituency poll” for the local projections.
And on the doorstep in Longwell Green, the early signs are promising.
After finishing talking to the woman on her front lawn, Sir Jacob goes to two addresses where people tell the former business secretary he has their vote. At the second address, a resident who is taking a break from fixing his dishwasher shares his main issues: “Immigration and the taxes if Labour get in.”
But around the corner, problems arise for Sir Jacob and his team.
First, a mother holding her three-month-old baby abruptly says she won’t be voting for Sir Jacob, then, at the next door, a man says he’s considering voting for Reform UK.
The theme continues at the next semi-detached home where a family are working on an extension outside.
“We have always voted Tory but we’re feeling really disappointed,” says one of them. “People feel they [the Conservative Party] haven’t delivered on the things they promised to do. We are losing our culture because of mass migration.”
Sir Jacob accepts their frustration. “We made a mistake,” he says, pointing to an expanded migrant labour force after the Covid pandemic. Legal migration is coming back under control, he says.
But it doesn’t end there.
One of the family draws parallels between Sir Jacob, Nigel Farage and Reform UK. “Why not be Reform?” he asks.
“The party is bigger than the leader – the membership of the party has the view I have,” replies Sir Jacob, who goes on to openly question the quality of candidates standing for Reform.
“A vote for them is a vote for Lib Dems or Labour,” he adds.
But then he finds more support.
Self-employed builder Geoff Meek, 58, stops work on a semi-detached property to shake Sir Jacob’s hand. “Things are going well for us,” he says, pointing to a rise in the national insurance threshold.
Couple David and Ann Hockney also warmly welcome Sir Jacob at the doorstep of their home, although Ms Hockney, 71, admits she’s toying with voting for Reform UK. “Immigration,” she says, when I ask why.
Down one cul-de-sac, at a large detached home, a woman who shakes Sir Jacob’s hand jokes she won’t wash her hands again.
A retired man, Mike Morrison, standing outside his garage also gives the incumbent his backing.
The 87-year-old, who has lived in the area for 43 years, tells Sir Jacob the former Tory MP Chris Skidmore, who resigned from his Kingswood seat over Mr Sunak’s oil and gas licence plan in January, used to live around the corner.
“The rotter,” quips Mr Morrison.
That’s the next stop; Mr Skidmore’s old address, a detached home with a large driveway. Owner Martyn Chugg says he’ll be voting for Sir Jacob, adding that Reform UK’s manifesto is in “cuckoo land”.
The 70-year-old says affordable housing is a big issue of the election, with his son in his thirties still living at the family home.
As I watch the canvassers begin to wrap up the morning’s proceedings, plumber Anthony Murphy, 44, tells Sir Jacob he’ll be voting Reform. “Nigel is the only one who talks sense,” he tells me.
I ask Sir Jacob how it’s gone.
“It seems pretty encouraging,” he says, “but you’ve got to be careful. People are nice and good-mannered, and if someone’s polite to you it doesn’t necessarily mean they will be voting Conservative for you.
“It’s very easy to assume a friendly comment, even a selfie, means they are a supporter, but it’s not always true.”
Back in the office for lunch, where Sir Jacob has a Greggs ham and cheese sandwich and a box of eclairs, I put to him the possibility of losing his seat.
“If you throw your hat in the ring, you must expect that sometimes people will throw the hat back at you,” he says.
I then ask if he’s worried it could provide a “Portillo” moment – when former Tory leader contender Michael Portillo was defeated in 1997 – on election night.
“If you look at the opinion polls, there can be about 100 Portillo moments,” Sir Jacob adds, with a laugh. “Portillo will have bred and taken over the world if it’s going quite the way the opinion polls indicate, so we’ll have to wait and see what happens.”
The interview ends, and I realise I’ve been sipping Sir Jacob’s black coffee.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he says, with a smile, as I leave him to finish lunch with his agent and mother ahead of a busy afternoon of canvassing in the battle for his political career.
