Jacob Rees-Mogg has said he is “very strongly” considering standing at the next general election after losing his seat to Labour.
The former Tory cabinet minister told an audience at the Edinburgh fringe festival that the Conservatives had “deserved” to lose the recent election, and that he was not shocked after losing his North East Somerset and Hanham seat to the mayor of the West of England Dan Norris by more than 5,000 votes. Rees-Mogg had won it from Norris in 2010.
While he said he was not “absolutely certain” that he would seek election in 2029, he said his love for politics and parliament still stood.
Speaking as part of The Political Party show with Matt Forde on Sunday, Rees-Mogg said he did not think the Tories could have “overcome a 20% deficit in the opinion polls”, adding: “I wrote to my children at boarding school before the election to say ‘Look, I will probably lose.’ I tried my best to warn them that I was going to lose my seat.
“We governed badly, we hadn’t done what we told people we would do. We put up taxes when we said that we wouldn’t, we hadn’t dealt with migration, and we hadn’t governed well. I can’t pretend we didn’t deserve it.”
Despite admitting that he was not shocked by the election result, the former minister praised Rishi Sunak for handling the election result with “great dignity”.
Reflecting on his future, Rees-Mogg, who presents a GB News programme, added: “I am not absolutely certain but I love politics and I love being in the parliament. So I am thinking very strongly about standing again.”
He also condemned critics of Liz Truss’s regime who he believed had resorted to “personal” attacks on the former prime minister.
Last week Truss left the stage abruptly at an event to promote her own book after campaigners unfurled a banner behind her emblazoned with the phrase: “I crashed the economy” with a picture of a lettuce. She said the prank was “not funny” and called Led By Donkeys “far-left activists” who used the stunt as a means to “intimidate people and suppress free speech”.
Rees-Mogg said: “I think the attacks on her have become deeply unpleasant and go beyond the normal political criticism and have become very personal. She is not a bad person.”
The former MP was called “crass and condescending” by the cabinet minister, Pat McFadden, as he insisted that the days of “waging culture wars” against civil servants were over. McFadden had criticised Rees-Mogg for leaving notes on civil servants’ desks in an effort to shame them into stopping working from home.
