Hold on… why are we paying Jacob Rees-Mogg £17k in compensation?

If Jacob Rees-Mogg is entitled to £16,800 compensation for his role in the Truss government, it does rather raise the question: what do the rest of us get?

People appear to be outraged by the news that the former business secretary has received almost 17 grand compensation for a job he was in for just 49 days. You would think, would you not, that as one of the very few people who actually had a say in first making Liz Truss prime minister, and then serving in her cabinet, Rees-Mogg would now have to personally pay compensation to the entire country, rather than the other way around.

But if it doesn’t seem fair that Rees-Mogg has come out of the economy-detonating, mortgage-wrecking Truss weeks at least 17 grand up, then, come on, at least it’s only 17 grand. Compared to the billions made by the managers of all the hedge funds who told Kwasi Kwarteng what a great job he was doing while simultaneously betting on everything going spectacularly wrong, 17 grand is nothing.

Ah, hang on – he’s also got his own hedge fund, hasn’t he, and it paid him a £500K dividend three months after he got sacked? All bases covered, then.

What also appears to have struck a nerve is the rancid hypocrisy involved. Before becoming business secretary for fully seven weeks, Rees-Mogg held the newly created, cabinet-level position of “minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency”.

On the “Brexit opportunities” front, the main one he found was the still as-yet theoretical possibility that the UK might be able to buy more powerful vacuum cleaners from South Korea.

On the “government efficiency” front, he advocated to reduce severance pay to civil servants by 25 per cent. That recommendation was not, in the end, taken up. But having told civil servants to expect their redundancy terms to be drastically reduced, you’d think he wouldn’t have been quite so keen to take the full amount himself.

It may not have escaped your attention that one of the “government efficiencies” he also did not recommend was getting rid of the minister for Brexit opportunities, on account of there not being any. He was got rid of in the end, and somehow, the government did not need to appoint a new minister for government efficiency in order to work out that a minister for government efficiency was not needed.

What might be needed, in the circumstances, would be a minister for blatant p***-takes. Rees-Mogg was sacked from his job because Tory MPs decided to take down their own government. There are only about 350 Tory MPs, and about a hundred of them are what’s known as on the government “payroll”. Traditionally, governments tend not to vote for their own downfall, as to do so would be, in the words of Jim Callaghan, akin to “turkeys voting for Christmas”.

But it doesn’t appear to quite work like that, does it?

Greg Hands, chairman of the Conservative Party, got paid almost eight grand to cope with having been made redundant from his role in the business department. A week after the fully one-month-long deadline that would have required him to hand that payout back, he was reappointed by the next lot.

To stretch the analogy somewhat beyond breaking point, in a brave new world where you rack up three prime ministers in a single year, suddenly it’s Christmas every day – and the turkeys are the taxpayers.