It was Angela Rayner who tweeted, when Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg spent a Commons debate slouching on his back, that she was “half expecting his nanny to march into the chamber with a blanket, pillow and a hot cup of Horlicks for the poor man”.
Now Rees-Mogg’s nanny will star alongside the rest of the family, including the former MP’s six children who the nanny now looks after, in a fly-on-the-wall documentary on Discovery+, Meet the Rees-Moggs.
The documentary will be released this year and promises to “lift the lid on the man behind the public image” over the course of five hour-long episodes. It makes Rees-Mogg the latest politician to make a foray into reality TV, with previous examples including Matt Hancock’s stint on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
Rees-Mogg, who lost his seat of North East Somerset in the general election, has a show on GB News, which the media regulator Ofcom found had breached impartiality rules by allowing Conservative MPs to serve as news presenters.
Discovery+ has promised the show will offer a “never-before-seen look” into the life of the ex-MP. It will follow him through the run-up to the general election and its aftermath, as his 14-year tenure in the Commons came to an end.
Rees-Mogg has said the series “may be a bit more Fawlty Towers than Downton Abbey”.
“Animals, children, an election and a film crew. What could possibly go wrong?” he said. “This everyday story of Somerset folk is fun to film but may be a bit more Fawlty Towers than Downton Abbey.”
The former MP is known for his old-fashioned dress sense and sensibility. He once said that despite having six children – the youngest of whom is named Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher Rees-Mogg – he had never changed a nappy. “The nanny does it brilliantly,” he said at the time. “I’ve made no pretence to be a modern man at all, ever.”
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Instead, his children have been taken care of by the family nanny, Veronica Crook, who looked after Rees-Mogg when he was a child in the 1960s.