One of the particular joys on election results day was seeing certain MPs lose their seats. I’m not normally one for schadenfreude, but watching former PM Liz “Oops I Seem To Have Tanked The Economy” Truss ousted from her South West Norfolk constituency was an undeniably pleasurable experience. As was Grant “Remember That Time I Devised A Nonsensical Travel Traffic Light System During A Pandemic?” Shapps’s fall from grace. As was Therese “Just Eat Turnips” Coffey getting the boot.
But perhaps the sweetest of all was Sir Jacob “Excuse Me While I Have A Nap In The Middle Of A Crucial House Of Commons Debate” Rees-Mogg taking a battering when Labour candidate Dan Norris swept in to garner 5,000 more votes than the Tory candidate.
Celebrations were short-lived, however. If, like me, you naively assumed that by voting Rees-Mogg out of power we had voted him out of our lives, think again. The famously upper-class Etonian, known for his language and aesthetics reminiscent of an 18th-century workhouse owner, is about to embark upon a well-trodden career path for a certain brand of “quirky” failed politician: reality telly. Yes, he’s all set to monetise his old-timey “posh boy” schtick, with talks of a fly-on-the-wall documentary with Discovery+ well under way.
The Independent’s own South West reporter, Alex Ross, got a first-hand, up-close-and-personal look at the possible coming doc a few weeks ago, when Rees-Mogg turned up on the campaign trail with a full camera crew in tow. Although tight-lipped about what filming was for, the team followed him door-knocking around a housing estate on the edge of Bristol, had plans to shoot at his house, and even caused an uproar by filming him with his family at church, upstaging a group of children who were receiving their First Holy Communion.
Though Rees-Mogg seems “aware that he’s odd” and even appears to enjoy playing up to it, says Ross, the content of the possible documentary sounds fairly benign thus far. The one-time leader of the House of Commons was filmed having serious conversations with constituents about contentious issues, such as immigration, and trying to convince voters to stick with the Tories rather than switching to far-right party Reform UK.
Unfortunately, even if this first foray onto the small screen is relatively staid, it’s all too easy to imagine that it could be the jumping-off point for any number of spin-offs. The same idiosyncrasies that transformed Rees-Mogg from a relatively unknown backbencher to a cabinet member and headline-maker will equally make for so-awful-it’s-addictive car-crash TV. After all, this is the man whose first tweet was in Latin; who proudly stated he had never changed a single nappy, despite having six children; who was driven around Fife in a Mercedes by his childhood nanny when first standing for election in 1997 (“I was going to take my Bentley, but she wisely said that this would be seen as ostentatious and I should take Mummy’s Mercedes instead”).
Imagine the “hilarity” that would ensue by dropping him into a range of fish-out-of-water scenarios (which, let’s be honest, applies to most scenarios when someone is that divorced from reality). We could watch him trying to talk to people on benefits! Or interacting with criminals in prison! Or attempting to do his weekly shop in – gasp – Asda! Just wind him up and watch him take on the world of the working class, one “povo safari” adventure at a time.
There’s plenty of precedent, too, for swapping life as a public servant for the world of entertainment. He could go down the route of offering strange advice to ordinary people, agony uncle-style, à la Ann Widdicombe in her infamously unhinged BBC Two vehicle The Widdecombe Project. He could follow in the quick-step footsteps of Edwina Currie with a stint on Strictly, go viral like Matt Hancock being interrogated on Celebrity SAS, or emulate George Galloway’s creepy antics on Celebrity Big Brother (remember when he pretended to be a cat? Shudder).
The same idiosyncrasies that transformed Rees-Mogg from a relatively unknown backbencher to a cabinet member will equally make for so-awful-it’s-addictive car-crash TV
Or he could even go straight for the jackpot and sign up for I’m a Celebrity… Lord knows enough people would tune in for even the slightest chance of watching Rees-Mogg being forced to eat a kangaroo testicle. But here’s the thing: while we’re laughing at him, he’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. Not that he needs to, having amassed an estimated fortune of £100m thanks to his investment firm, Somerset Capital Management. It won’t be the cash incentive that sees Rees-Mogg heed the siren song of Celebrity Gogglebox, then, but rather the lure of celebrity itself. And whether or not he goes down that route will depend on whether he ever wants to be taken seriously as a politician again – a feat that’s hard to accomplish once the nation has seen you chowing down on animal genitalia.
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And here, I find myself torn. Because beneath all the tittering at his gangly frame, his penchant for top hats, his childhood stock market antics that saw him quizzing shareholders as a precocious 12-year-old, lies a man with deadly serious ideologies. Rees-Mogg has previously been called a climate denier, having questioned the scientific consensus on climate change and called for a relaxation of environmental regulations. He has argued against companies having to report on the gender pay gap. He has said the existence of food banks is a good thing and, when discussing why their usage has gone up, claimed that “the real reason for the rise in numbers is that people know that they are there and Labour deliberately didn’t tell them”. He doesn’t believe in same-sex marriage or abortion, calling the latter “a cult of death”.
So no, I really don’t want to see Rees-Mogg’s out-of-touch face plastered all over our screens, or hear his clipped public school tones every time I turn on the television. I have no interest in watching him perform the cringiest cha-cha-cha in the history of dance while clad in sequinned lycra or even eat kangaroo testes. But if it keeps him out of Westminster, then I say: take him to the jungle, or the ballroom, or the Big Brother House. As long as you “Get Him Out of Whitehall!” – well, you have my blessing.