Outside a vast country pile, a man with a thick West Country accent, who looks like Michel Roux Jr, polishes a luxury car. His name is Shaun. “He makes our cider, he looks after the Bentley,” an instantly recognisable drawl describes. “Everything that needs to be done in a busy household.” Welcome to the world of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the dandyish Brexiteer and pin-up of bootlickers everywhere, as depicted in a new Discovery+ documentary series, Meet the Rees-Moggs.
Jacob Rees-Mogg: your loveable, neighbourhood plutocrat. In early 2024, Rees-Mogg found himself agreeing to be shadowed by a documentary crew, who wanted to chart the realities of life with “one of the most divisive politicians in Britain” in the run-up to a, presumed, election before Christmas. But then – boom! – prime minister Rishi Sunak fired the rain-soaked starter pistol on the general election in May, upsetting the carefully laid plans for Meet the Rees-Moggs and, spoiler alert, paving the way for a Labour landslide. And so, Meet the Rees-Moggs starts as an intimate portrait of a family caught up in the tough reality that their much-admired patriarch is about to lose his job.
Of course, it doesn’t really matter to the Rees-Moggs. That’s the point. They have their beautiful country house (the children quibble over whether it’s technically “a mansion”), Gournay Court, in Somerset, as well as a £5m townhouse behind Westminster Abbey. So, while Rees-Mogg does some perfunctory door-knocking, quietly undermining the government while bashing his Labour rival, he never feels particularly overcome by the jeopardy. “Jacob has got the fight of his political life on his hands,” his wife, Helena, remarks, and yet that fight is conducted with a passivity bordering on indolence.
It may well be that the Discovery+ camera crews were not given access to the brains trust of political strategists who would, eventually, help Rees-Mogg to a 5,319-vote defeat in North Somerset and Hanham. After all, the show was not envisioned as a hard-hitting political documentary, but as a portrait of a curious, attention-seeking family. Jacob, well known to the public; his wife, Helena, a droller figure; their six children, of whom only the youngest three are routinely at home; the staff, orbiting the family, including nanny Veronica, who swaddled Jacob and now looks after his children. “I think the world’s got quite enough Rees-Moggs already,” remarks Helena, when asked about the possibility of a seventh child. And yet, while the quantity might be met, the thirst for publicity appears unslakeable.
Rees-Mogg is one of Britain’s most recognisable politicians for a reason. Tall, with cartoonish features like a Trumpton figurine, he is rarely dressed in less than a three-piece suit. He speaks in a lazy drone and seems to hark back to a previous age, a time when aristocrats ran our democracy. “I quite enjoy winding people up,” he announces early on. And that’s about as far as the show goes in challenging Rees-Mogg on social or political issues. Commentary about immigration is glossed over. His Roman Catholicism is admired; its impact on his legislating – such as calling abortion “morally reprehensible” even in cases of incest or rape – all but ignored. He is afforded an avuncular, often buffoonish, quality that the show makers clearly think is TV gold. “So ‘wasteman’ isn’t ‘rizz’?” he asks, probing his teenage daughter, Mary, on contemporary slang. You can almost hear the commissioners howling with laughter.
Plink plonk: the score announces, if it wasn’t clear already, that this is all whimsical fun. “Hello, my great man,” Rees-Mogg says to his youngest son, Sixtus, as though he can’t quite remember his name. With the eldest three safely squirrelled away at boarding school (though one suspects there is an element of self-preservation at play, too, among the teenagers), the lens falls mainly on Anselm (12), Alfred (8) and Sixtus (7, on election day). Here, the show enters murkier ethical grounds. Will these children – innocent of their own privilege still – come to regret the primetime broadcast of them yelling “Vote Conservative!” into a megaphone, or dressing up in black tie to eat birthday cake? Will they regret – because their parents surely won’t – their part in propagandising for the silver spoon brigade? The music might be cueing that this isn’t to be taken too seriously, and yet the instinctual response is the same as watching Teen Mom or Super Nanny – to feel like it’s not quite fair on these non-consenting participants.
The mercy of Meet the Rees-Moggs is that it’s so toothless it will likely pass, undetected, through the TV schedule. Those expecting a hate-watch will be disappointed; those expecting a political hagiography will find it vapid. And also: how many UK households have a Discovery+ subscription? No, if the former MP is looking to kickstart his life after parliament, then he’s going to have to do it the good, old-fashioned way: by going on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!