07 Mar 2018

Back to the Future? Could Jacob Rees-Mogg really be the next Conservative leader and PM?

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If the bookmakers are to be believed, then there is a clear favourite in the undeclared race to succeed Theresa May at some point in this Parliament and become the next Conservative Party leader and hence Prime Minister. That individual is not, though, a member of the current Cabinet nor has he ever held ministerial office. He is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the son of William (later Lord) Rees-Mogg, Member of Parliament since 2010 for North East Somerset, and the darling of the ‘hard Brexit’ fraternity. His standing is a surprise to many as he is, to put it mildly, a rather traditional figure in style and views, so much so that he has been described as the ‘Honourable Member for the 18th Century’. Who is he? Why is he attracting such interest? Could he be the next Prime Minister?

Who is Jacob Rees-Mogg?

Mr Rees-Mogg is certainly an unusual individual. A very clever and courteous man, he is everything that a modern political spin-doctor would not want in a potential candidate. He admits to not being a ‘modern man’ and some would dispute that he is even fashionable enough to be an ancient one.

He first came to public attention (of a sort) as a 12-year-old who bought stocks and shares (as the typical pre-teenager obviously does) and then turned up to AGMs to berate company chairmen for the inadequate dividends that they were offering (he was probably right on that one, in fairness).

I first came to know him when we were university contemporaries at Oxford in the late 1980s, and the only occasion that I can ever recall him not wearing a three-piece suit and a tie was when I once fleetingly saw him attired in cricket whites (although they looked three-piece as well). He is certainly truly authentic. Unlike, say, Boris Johnson, what you see is what you get and is in no way an act. His standpoint is that of a High Tory (stratospheric in many ways) reinforced by Roman Catholicism.

His voyage into Parliament has not been a straightforward one. With a plummy accent and having made a fortune as a very effective fund manager, he struggled to find a parliamentary berth against the charge that he lacked the common touch. He fought a seat in Scotland (Central Fife) in 1997 and another at The Wrekin in Shropshire in 2001, and on neither occasion set the local electorate on fire. He finally struck gold near his home base when the new seat of Somerset North East was created.

In Parliament he has proved a master of procedure and in particular the art of the filibuster (talking out private members bills of which he disapproved). His record in this regard includes sinking the Daylight Savings Time Bill by moving an amendment at some length which would have allowed his county of Somerset to have its own time zone 15 minutes behind GMT/BST (neither the bill or his amendment passed but that was the whole point of the exercise), and in another debate employed the word ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ to use up time (it means, apparently, ‘the habit of considering as worthless’). This is deemed to be the longest word ever recorded in Hansard and, I suspect, in a BVCA Insight, come to think of it.

At a personal level, he married quite late (in 2007) but he (or more accurately his wife, a Somerset heiress) have produced six children in a decade. As five of these are boys, one suspects that the Bursar of Eton College is rubbing his hands in fee income expectation. All of which has afforded him something close to a cult status among elements of his own party faithful.

So not an obvious favourite to be the next PM then. Why is he thought to be the front-runner?

In a word, Brexit. In two words, hard Brexit.

Fate has made Mr Rees-Mogg the de facto leader of the pure Brexit camp in the parliamentary Conservative Party. This is in part due to his intelligence and his willingness to speak out but also because of a large slice of fortune. When Mrs May became the Prime Minister in July 2016 she installed Boris Johnson, David Davis and Liam Fox in her Cabinet. This meant that none of them could be the leader of backbench Brexit sentiment.

In 2017, this hardened as Michael Gove (who had been fired in 2016) and Dominic Raab, a really good dark-horse bet to be the next Conservative leader (who had resigned in 2016), came back into government which meant that they too could not champion the hard Brexit cause. Added to this, Steve Baker, who has none of Mr Rees-Mogg’s profile, but could have been an alternative advocate for the hard Brexit lobby, also came in to the May administration as a junior minister at the Department for Exiting the European Union, so he too became bound by collective responsibility and could not fly the flag for Brexit on the green benches in the House of Commons. Mr Baker is an engaging, interesting soul, a popular and principled figure, whose views are the curious combination of born-again Christianity and his devotion to the writings of the (distinctly atheist) American libertarian philosopher, Ayn Rand.

So, by a process of elimination, Mr Rees-Mogg has become the voice of the pure Brexit camp. This, plus an instinct for appealing to the basic instincts of a large slice of the Conservative Party membership in the country (although a large slice of 120,000 people in a nation of 65 million citizens is not vast), has made him something of a political celebrity. His status was entrenched earlier this year when he became Chairman of the European Research Group of Conservative MPs (an organisation with an arguably odd name as the only thing it ‘researches’ is how quickly the UK can be shot of Europe). This has allowed him a further wave of media exposure and hence the money placed at the bookies.

So is he actually poised for victory?

I do not like to pick a fight with the bookmakers but the answer is a firm ‘no’. The logic of his odds at the moment seems to be based on the fact that the European Research Group is associated with about 60 Conservative MPs and his undoubted appeal to some Conservative Party stalwarts.

The rules surrounding the Conservative Party leadership contest, however, are that MPs choose the top two contenders and then the ‘mass’ membership makes the final decision between them. A base of 60 MPs is not enough to ensure a place in the final run-off and many of those 60 would not back Mr Rees-Mogg in a leadership election even if they admire him and agree with him.

Furthermore, once a leadership election comes and assuming that it is at least in part a surrogate internal referendum as to how to handle Brexit, then it can be safely assumed that a number of pro-Leave ministers would be able to stand and state what they really thought should be the Government’s approach to the EU. Mr Rees-Mogg would be outflanked by rivals whom most of his parliamentary colleagues will think were more likely to win a general election against Jeremy Corbyn or any successor than he would be.

Other MPs would also calculate that his strident convictions on social/cultural issues (an absolute opposition to abortion, firm disapproval of homosexuality, distaste for divorce, a lack of empathy for feminism in any form and general contempt for change) would split the party if he were elected. The chances are that he would not have the chance ever to make his case to the full party membership (although if he were to be in the last two contestants almost anything may happen to the outcome).

This does not, nevertheless, render either him or what he stands for as inconsequential. Whether as a candidate or not, he could exercise a strong gravitational pull in any election. He would set out a standard for 24-carat Brexit that his more senior rivals for the leadership on the hard Brexit side of the argument would need to position themselves near if they wanted to ensure both that (a) they came out of the parliamentary aspect of the process as the leading figure on the ‘Leave’ side and (b) to be confident that they would be effectively placed with the (strongly pro-Brexit) wider membership.

While Mr Rees-Mogg is unlikely to be the king, he could well emerge as a pivotal king-maker. In this context, he is a potentially extremely significant figure and to be watched exceptionally seriously.

Tim Hames
Director General, BVCA


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