When UK fertility rates have fallen to below replacement levels, extended exposure to the home life of Jacob Rees-Mogg and his six children may not be much help in turning things around.
As much as the devout Catholic and TV presenter is sincere, on GBNews, where he urges viewers to follow his example, he might reflect on how the spectacle of, in particular, his younger children, squirming and showing off, could inadvertently double – being an exceptionally strong disincentive to parenthood – as contraception. Something for Rees-Mogg to consider, anyway, at his next confession.
As for his children: not since Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a 2012 series in which a likewise unprepossessing US family monetised, for two years, its domestic life, have parents and programme makers advertised such indifference to the interests of extremely young performers whose participation is critical to the show. Publicising the series, the Rees-Moggs have indicated that their bathrooms, kept off camera, were considered more private than their children. Without Sixtus, Alfred, Anselm et al, the new series could hardly advance on earlier ventures in Rees-Mogg self-promotion, after the financier turned MP discovered there was a paying audience for his eccentricities. Or not unless he risked interrogation on subjects such as Donald Trump, windfarms, Rwanda, or Boris Johnson that might undermine his depiction in this series as, above all, droll.
The addition of his droll wife, droll servants and six theoretically droll children are, then, what distinguish the new Rees-Mogg worship, which tracks his recent political exit, from earlier emphasis on his nanny, cars and affectations. Even with their participation, which alternates with scenes of Rees-Mogg driving about Somerset and drawling various banalities, the programme makers plainly struggle with the fact that their hero is, by now, predictable and, at worst, a bore, even more so than his wife on the school run.
On election day, the production team, either dazzled or desperate, seeks variety in Sixtus opening his birthday presents (a shopping trip to buy them has been exhaustively detailed), playing with them, blowing out candles and, finally, going to bed. That these unremarkable activities occur in demi-baronial settings does, it’s true, lend a kind of cachet that might be unique in reality TV if the royal family had not, long ago, ventured into the same territory. The exhibiting of young Rees-Moggs for their father’s benefit differs only by degree from the royal exhibiting of children, also too young to give informed consent, most recently in the short film where the Wales’ family were professionally filmed romping in meadows. Another performance is due at their mother’s annual carol service at which, traditionally, they show up in Railway Children outfits and carry candles.
The makers of Meet the Rees-Moggs could be right to expect that his offer of a baronetcy and candlelit tureens plus the indulgent notion of his being the “MP for the 18th century”, will afford the kind of unofficial protection that has spared the royals, and upcoming practitioners, Boris and Mrs Johnson, the kind of accusations levelled at less courtly sharenters, such as Katie Price, the Beckhams, Kardashians, Gwyneth Paltrow. After Paltrow shared a skiing photograph in 2019 with her 5.4m Instagram followers, her daughter commented: “Mom we have discussed this. You may not post anything without my consent.” Paltrow: “You can’t even see your face!”
The resulting debate about parental distribution of children’s images anticipated research confirming the risk of children coming to feel uncomfortable and embarrassed about this irreversible loss of privacy. “Sharenting syndrome,” says one study, “can be considered a form of child abuse and neglect, akin to Munchausen syndrome by proxy.”
In the case of the Rees-Mogg television series, the audience not only sees the children’s faces but enjoys protracted sequences of them behaving in ways that, like so much in the life of the parent Rees-Mogg, would have dismayed in any century, not just the 18th. If his boys are shown being obnoxious, it is presumably because the older Moggfluencers happily signed it off, and the programme makers are strangely confident, for their part, about the ethics of showcasing teens and under tens, even with parental consent. Whatever that is worth from the kind of parents happy to say, on camera: “Don’t tell the others, but Alfred may be our brightest child.”
With luck, anyway, the documentary makers will have scattered if ever a grown up Rees-Mogg questions, like some participants in ITV’s original Seven-Up!, the way they were used. “I do feel there are aspects of it where I feel very, very humiliated by these things that I’ve said in the past,” Suzy Lusk has said, regretting some of the things she was asked, aged seven, by the late Michael Apted. Not that she ever boasted, like a Rees-Mogg child, “we have a mansion”. To be fair to the Rees-Mogg film-makers, their deference seems entirely genuine. “What’s it like being a Rees-Mogg?” “How would you describe your dad?”
How easily Sixtus and siblings will deal now, and in future, with their exposure probably depends, as with the royals, how effectively Rees-Mogg has instilled in them his fundamental values: exhibitionism, snobbery, entitlement, ostentatious piety. Whatever its faults, the series will be instructive for any parent or cult member interested in learning from an acknowledged master, how to clone yourself. Rees-Mogg senior asks his sons if they wouldn’t like to be MPs, teaches reverence for Boris and Carrie, offers religious instruction at the table, appoints them altar boys in a weird private chapel where he shows off his reliquary collection, probably a first in reality television: “This is a bit of thorn from the crown of thorns”.
If he shows scant concern for the excessive veneration of relics, that regrettable weakness is, after all, the sole reason this series was commissioned.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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