Jacob Rees-Mogg’s townhouse is a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament. The family nanny, Veronica Crook, greets me with a smile. Crook was Rees-Mogg’s nanny from the day he was born and is now nanny to him and his six children. There is a huge, handsome portrait of her next to the kitchen. In the large room opposite, huge handsome portraits of family members and historical figures hang on the walls.
It wouldn’t take long to work out who lives here if you were playing Through the Keyhole. The loo is plastered with newspaper cartoons about the former Conservative MP and minister, riffing on his scorn for civil servants, lockdown regulations and the EU. Then there are the cartoons celebrating his image as Mr Nasty: Rees-Mogg as a bespectacled cat saying: “I wouldn’t hurt a fly” while his left front paw pins down a petrified mouse; with a baby Boris Johnson in his arms, as a spitting Theresa May says: “Your daddy is a horrible person!” Rees-Mogg, 55, is famous for floccinaucinihilipilification – a word he introduced into parliamentary debate in 2012, meaning the act of considering something to be worthless.
