Reality TV star Jacob Rees-Mogg is launching a new career – but the locals aren’t convinced

Pro-Brexit, pro-hunting, anti-abortion former Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is a somewhat divisive figure. During his long political career, outrage followed him around like his hoard of six offspring. He was forced to apologise for grotesque comments about the victims of the Grenfell tragedy; his dubious investment funds in Ireland pre-Brexit landed him in hot water. The notorious speeches he delivered in parliament, his arrogance and his peculiarly Victorian parlance have all made Rees-Mogg a household name which, now, has come in quite handy.

Having lost his seat as an MP for northeast Somerset in July, this week he’s launching into a new era of his career – as a reality TV star.

Meet the Rees-Moggs, a fly-on-the-wall documentary airing on Discovery + from 2 December, follows the GB News presenter’s life in the run-up to the general election and through his withering defeat to Labour’s Dan Norris. The series is mostly shot at Mogg’s £5.5m, 17th-century 9-bedroom Somerset mansion, Gournay Court, (not to be confused with his £5m London townhouse) where Rees-Mogg lives like a rural Liberace, in a mansion full of oil paintings with a large gold cross over his bed.

Keeping Up With the Conservatives (as deemed by Tatler) “will be a rather different kettle of fish from the Kardashians,” Rees-Mogg assured. Observers of the fame-hungry, multi-millionaire aren’t so sure, perhaps especially those who, for the last 14 years, have lived in close proximity to the family.

In northeast Somerset, where he represented the Conservative Party, there’s little enthusiasm for yet another episode (five, in fact) of the Rees-Mogg saga.

Locals are full of anecdotes that, over the years, have painted a pretty unpleasant picture of the former Etonian. When I visit Keynsham High Street – in the heart of his constituency – they don’t hold back. “He was fairly useless as a local MP and his voting track record in parliament is abhorrent,” Ben Green from Paulton, a nearby village, tells me. “I think he’s a nasty individual in a twee 19th-century gentleman cartoon character façade,” he adds.

It’s true that Rees-Mogg cuts an unusual figure wherever he goes. In the documentary, we see him uncomfortably lolloping past charity shops, vape shops and tanning studios in a double-breasted blazer – a stark contrast to the opulence of his family home.

Yet Rees-Mogg insisted to The Sunday Times that viewers would see from the doc that “what goes on behind the walls of Gournay Court is not so different to their own home”. Those familiar scenes include shots of the butler polishing the Bentley and a housekeeper starching his boxers. Rees-Mogg takes tea in fine china and hosts black tie dinners on Saturday evenings, for which his children wear smoking jackets and bow ties and are served from silver terrines. Still, Rees-Mogg wonders how “people feel politicians are just completely out of touch”.

open image in gallery

“People like that have no clue what everyday people have to go through,” local resident Daisy Yeo, 22, tells me. He’s not fit to represent the UK, she says – and certainly not representative of the “young, diverse, student city” that is nearby Bristol, “filled with people from different backgrounds and economic situations”. She finds his views on abortion “insensitive – he’s a privileged white man, he should have no say on what happens to women’s bodies.”

Rees-Mogg’s views on abortion – he believes it should be criminalised even in cases of rape or incest – are almost universally reviled. He attributes them to his religious beliefs, which his large Catholic family follow devoutly. His six children – deep breath – Peter Theodore Alphege Rees-Mogg, Mary Anne Charlotte Emma Rees-Mogg, Thomas Wentworth Somerset Dunstan Rees-Mogg, Anselm Charles Fitzwilliam Rees-Mogg, Alfred Wulfric Leyson Pius Rees-Mogg, and Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher Rees-Mogg – appear alongside their father in the doc, as does his Boden-wearing wife, Helena de Chair, who is heiress to a reported £45m fortune.

Despite his fecundity, Rees-Mogg proudly claims he’s never changed a nappy. That’s done by nanny Veronica, appointed before Jacob was born, which by my count means she has been dealing with his family’s sh*t for almost 60 years.

open image in gallery

It checks out, according to Ben Green. He ran into Rees-Mogg only once while he was a serving MP on a family day out at Midsomer Norton station, where Green’s wife happened to be breastfeeding. “Mogg saw her and turned away immediately, as if the thought of seeing a woman breastfeeding was terrifying,” he says.

I am told Rees-Mogg was often heckled when out campaigning, people defaced his election posters, and in 2019, a giant sign appeared on a slagheap in nearby Midsomer Norton proclaiming “Get Mogg Out”. David Leverton ran the “Mogg Watch” campaign raising awareness of the MP’s voting record. He considers Rees-Mogg, “seems to despise people who are poorer than… almost all of us are poorer than him”.

One area Rees-Mogg does seem genuine about is his faith. Meet the Rees-Moggs shows him teaching his youngest, Sixtus, the catechisms, in preparation for his holy communion. He has built his own chapel, complete with relics he collects (although simony is a sin). But who could resist a bit of thorn, from the crown of thorns? I wonder how much it cost him?

Several locals tell me they’ve spotted Rees-Mogg in churches around the parish. In Midsomer Norton and Glastonbury, writer Guy Kennaway tells me, “He looks amazingly congruous – but then on Glastonbury high street you can see a guy in a suit of armour and another in the full wizard kit. In this company Mogg looks almost ordinary”.

open image in gallery

Gideon Davey is less delighted by his encounter with Rees-Mogg who “rocked up unannounced” with a film crew to the church where 10 little children, amongst them Davey’s 10-year-old daughter, were making their first Holy Communion.

“It’s a very holy moment, a big day, attended by family and godparents. The children had been preparing and practising for weeks”, Davey says, “None of us knew or were asked permission for Rees-Mogg to film. He paraded around the church, was filmed attending mass and interviewed on the steps. I was shocked he’d use his faith in that way, to degrade his religion, stain it and hijack another family’s special moment. It felt so cynical”.

“First holy communion is a massive once-in-a-lifetime moment for children and he just trampled all over it. It totally ruined the day. Several people wrote to the diocese to complain,” Davey tells me, asking, “How would he feel if his son’s confirmation was crashed by David Beckham with a film crew? My mother was so upset that at the last election, she didn’t vote conservative for the first time in her 86 years.”

As we watch Rees-Mogg lose his seat on camera, his PA considers how sad he will be “It’s like being told you’re not wanted anymore,” she says. Indeed.