Meet the Rees-Moggs, the reality TV show about Jacob Rees-Mogg and his family is here, and it will be fascinating, because he is. It is easy to take him at face value, which means his own terms: an old Etonian with a moldering manor house, a rich wife, mesmerizingly named children and a nanny who lives in and scolds him. He shares their lives, courtesy of the production company that made At Home With The Furys because he wants the world to understand him.
“When they [his Leftist enemies] find out that what goes on behind the walls of Gournay Court [the manor] is not so different to their own home, they may pause for thought,” he told The Sunday Times. It’s political outreach then, a plea for tolerance and, perhaps, a political comeback: once longing to be prime minister, he lost his seat in the summer Tory cull. Having your own Reality TV show offers what political operatives call “cut through”. People will listen if they know who you are. That’s the theory, at least, and it airs on Discovery+, which specialises in anthropology.
Good television is bad politics. Haven’t we learnt that yet?
It is apt at least, because I am not sure Rees-Mogg offers authenticity. Rather, he is that very British self-creation: a studied pastiche. He isn’t from an aristocratic background: though his father William Rees-Mogg was the editor of The Times his maternal grandfather, Thomas Morris, was a lorry driver whose daughter, Rees-Mogg’s mother Gillian, married her boss. Jacob was born in Hammersmith, defying Jilly Cooper’s dictum that the posh do not go there, the fourth of five children. In a family that large, you learn to court attention, or you’re lost. He seems to be a 12-year-old’s ideal of an editor of The Times. I’m not sure.
From his Eton days, he cultivated the persona and landscape of a pre-war aristocrat. A fellow journalist wondered to what extent he mirrors Patricia Highsmith’s confidence trickster Tom Ripley but concluded: not that much. (No murders). It’s no less laughable than an aristocrat that speaks Mockney, but it is more unusual, and I can’t work out if Rees-Mogg is desperately uneasy, not uneasy at all, or both. It’s pastiche because it is so open, pleading, almost: the real landed aristocracy shop at Sainsbury’s, and dress like tramps. Psychologically, Rees-Mogg is a fascinating subject for a documentary — about class, of course — and I wonder how much of his unease — in the end, I land on unease — we will see before the cameras.
But good television is bad politics: haven’t we learnt that yet, with the magician to The Apprentice on the American throne? Rees-Mogg may fantasise that Meet the Rees-Moggs will convert a generation to his Thatcherite cause on Discovery+, sell some merchandise — top hats, umbrellas, menswear? — and crack America. It’s possible. But it is unserious, and I blame us more than them. If we didn’t listen, they wouldn’t talk.
Boris Johnson was our first Reality TV politician: we knew more of his personal life than we did of his politics
Cut-through is the watchword. But what does that mean? Trump cut through — with the oblivious endorsement of the liberal media, who did his PR for free in horror — and now the great Republic is a Reality TV show: watch guest star Elon Musk cut the budget! I think of Network, of course: Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 masterpiece about how, if news becomes entertainment, our civilisation will fall: drugged by news that isn’t news, we will lack the attention and the information — even the will — to navigate our democracy. Chayefsky’s TV people dream of news shows called Suicide of the Week, Execution of the Week, and The Death Hour. I fantasise that Discovery+ would take them all.
In Britain we have a smaller version, though no less destructive, and I cannot say if Keir Starmer, who is not a reality TV politician, will survive the landscape he walks through. Populism is made for TV in a way that governing isn’t. Never forget that Boris Johnson became famous on Have I Got News for You: how Chayefsky would love the irony of the title. Johnson was our first Reality TV politician: we knew more of his personal life than we did of his politics simply because there was more of it. Enjoy the spectacle and ignore the reality of a country crumbling to dust. That is part of the spectacle — the true Reality — because cut-through, in the end, is just more disconnect. Chayefsky’s plea was — switch off your TV! I can only add: before Nigel Farage gets his show. It’s coming.
Tanya Gold is a columnist for The Standard
