Do not be deceived by his unreality show. Jacob Rees-Mogg is a nasty, dangerous man

There’s a memorable moment in Meet the Rees-Moggs – which, given the other-worldliness of its principal characters, is probably best described as “unreality television” – when Jacob Rees-Mogg is asked by a friend whether voters told him that the politicians don’t understand their lives. Rees-Mogg, in the elegant dining room of his Grade II-listed mansion, antique furniture, oil paintings with a new Jaguar and nice old Bentley outside, family fortune approaching £100m, double-barrelled, double-breasted, and about to be doubly thumped by Labour and Reform UK, drawled: “Yes, people feel politicians are just completely out of touch.” Indeed so, but no politician in modern times has put such effort into being so performatively, cruelly and provocatively out of touch as this self-made anachronism. The Conservative Party has produced many “characters” over the years, some with views as outrageous as their manners and high exhibitionism – the late Nicky Fairbairn for one, Sir Gerald Nabarro and Bob Boothby arguably two further examples – but none rose so far and so determinedly as Rees-Mogg during the Tory party’s locust years. Jacob Rees-Mogg is a mass of what we may politely call “contradictions”: a man who preached Brexit yet established a business in Dublin so that his investment business could still do business in the EU; a hedge fund manager who’s acquired the trappings of the landed aristocracy; the trustee of a gorgeous corner of Somerset who defines the reality of anthropomorphic climate change.