Jacob William Rees-Mogg (born 24 May 1969) is a British politician serving as Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council since 2019, and has served as Member of Parliament (MP) for North East Somerset since 2010. A member of the Conservative Party and the Cornerstone Group, Rees-Mogg is a social conservative.
Rees-Mogg was born in Hammersmith, London and educated at Eton College. He then studied History at Trinity College, Oxford and was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association. He worked in the City of London for Lloyd George Management until 2007, then co-founded a hedge fund management business Somerset Capital Management LLP.[1][2][3] He has amassed a significant fortune: his estimated net worth in 2016 was from £55 million to (including his wife's prospects) £150 million.[4][5] Moving into politics, he unsuccessfully contested the 1997 and 2001 general elections before being elected as the MP for North East Somerset in 2010.[6] He was reelected in 2015 and 2017, with an increased share of the vote each time. Within the Conservative Party he joined the traditionalist and socially conservative Cornerstone Group.
During the premiership of David Cameron, Rees-Mogg was one of the parliamentary Conservative Party's most rebellious members, opposing the government on issues such as the introduction of same-sex marriage. He became known for his speeches and filibustering in parliamentary debates.[clarification needed] A Eurosceptic, he proposed an electoral pact between the Conservatives and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and campaigned for the Leave side in the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union.[7] He joined the Eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG), becoming chairman in 2018.[8] He attracted support through the social media campaign Moggmentum and was promoted as a potential successor to Prime Minister Theresa May as Leader of the Conservative Party. He however endorsed Boris Johnson in the 2019 leadership contest.[9] Johnson appointed him Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council following his election as Conservative Leader and appointment as Prime Minister.
Rees-Mogg is a controversial figure in British politics. He has been characterised as socially conservative and praised as a conviction politician whose anachronistic upper-class mannerisms and consciously traditionalist attitudes are often seen as entertaining;[10][11][12] he has been dubbed the "Honourable Member for the 18th century".[13] Critics view him as a reactionary figure, some of his positions having made him the target of organised protests
Life and career
Early life and education
Rees-Mogg was born in Hammersmith, London on 24 May 1969, the younger son of William Rees-Mogg (1928–2012), a former editor of The Times newspaper, created a life peer in 1988, and Gillian Shakespeare Morris, his wife, a daughter of Thomas Richard Morris, a Conservative party local government politician and Mayor of St Pancras in London. He was one of five children, having three elder siblings, Emma Beatrice Rees-Mogg (born 1962),[14] Charlotte Louise Rees-Mogg (born 1964)[14] and Thomas Fletcher Rees-Mogg (born 1966),[14] and one younger sister, Annunziata Rees-Mogg (born 1979).
Prior to his birth, in 1964 the family purchased Ston Easton Park, a country house near the village of Ston Easton in Somerset, where Rees-Mogg grew up attending weekly mass and occasionally Sunday school at the Church of the Holy Ghost, Midsomer Norton.[16] Here he started catechism in 1975 under his governess and attended mass in the ordinary form.[17] A few years later, in 1978, the family moved to the nearby village of Hinton Blewett where they purchased The Old Rectory, a Grade II listed former rectory, today valued at £2 million.[18] Living in Somerset, he regularly commuted to his family's second home in Smith Square, London, where he also attended independent boys' prep school Westminster Under School.[19][20]
Growing up, Rees-Mogg was primarily raised by the family's nanny Veronica Crook, whom he describes as a formative figure.[21] Crook now looks after Rees-Mogg's own children, having worked for the family for over 50 years.[22]
When Rees-Mogg was ten, he was left £50 by a distant cousin, and his father, on his behalf, invested in shares in the now-defunct General Electric Company (GEC). Rees-Mogg ascribes to this event the beginnings of his interest in stock markets. Having learned how to read company reports and balance sheets, he later attended a shareholders' meeting at GEC, where he voted against a motion because dividends were too low.[4] He subsequently invested in London-based conglomerate Lonrho, eventually owning 340 shares, and reportedly caused the company's chairman Lord Duncan-Sandys "discomfort" by quizzing him at an annual general meeting on the low dividends offered to shareholders. In 1981, at a shareholders' meeting of GEC, in which he owned 175 shares at the time, he told the chairman Lord Nelson that the dividend on offer was "pathetic", sparking amusement among board members and the media.[23]
After prep school, Rees-Mogg entered Eton College, where he was described in a school report as a "particularly dogmatic" Thatcherite.[24] Upon leaving Eton, he had his portrait painted by Paul Branson RP for the Eton College Collections, which was later put on display during the Faces of 1993 Royal Society of Portrait Painters exhibition.[
Rees-Mogg read History at Trinity College, Oxford, where he graduated with an upper second-class honours degree in 1991.[26][27] Almost immediately after arriving in 1988, Cherwell nominated him for the title of "Pushy Fresher", printing a photograph of Rees-Mogg speaking in a suit with the caption "What more need we say?".[28] While at Oxford he became president of the Oxford University Conservative Association with what Cherwell described as a "campaign for world domination and social adequacy". Rees-Mogg was a member and frequent debater at the Oxford Union and elected Librarian, but Damian Hinds defeated him for president of the Union.[29][30][28] Reflecting on his time at university, Rees-Mogg regretted not having studied Classics.[31]
Career
After graduating from the University of Oxford in 1991, Rees-Mogg worked for the Rothschild investment bank under Nils Taube before moving to Hong Kong in 1993[32] to join Lloyd George Management.[33][34] During his tenure in Hong Kong, he became a close friend of Governor Chris Patten and was a regular at Government House. Three years later, he returned to London and was put in charge of some of the firm's emerging markets funds. By 2003, he was managing a newly-established Lloyd George Emerging Markets Fund.[35] In 2007, Rees-Mogg left the company with a number of colleagues to set up their own fund management firm, Somerset Capital Management,[36] with the aid of hedge fund manager Crispin Odey. Following Rees-Mogg's election as the Member of Parliament for North East Somerset, he stepped down as chief executive of the company; however, he continues to receive income in his capacity as a partner.[32]
Somerset Capital Management is managed via subsidiaries in the tax havens of the Cayman Islands and Singapore. Rees-Mogg has defended offshore tax havens, and his vast wealth (£100,000,000+, with his wife, when she comes into her inheritance, as of November 2016)[37] has left him open to the criticism that he cannot understand the lives and concerns of many ordinary people.[38]
In 2018 Somerset Capital opened an investment fund in Dublin. The new business prospectus listed Brexit as one of the risks, as it could cause "considerable uncertainty". Rees-Mogg, a partner of the business who does not make investment decisions, defended the move, stating: "The decision to launch the fund was nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit."[39] When interviewed by Channel 4 in March 2019, Rees-Mogg declined to answer suggestions that their calculations showed that he could have earned £7 million in the period since the referendum,[40][41] and stated that the investment was made before Brexit. The Irish Times, whilst agreeing that the fund had warned of Brexit risks, noted that his actions caused 'mirth' on both sides of the Irish Sea as it still had access to the EU.[42] In July 2019, Rees-Mogg resigned from his part-time role at Somerset Capital Management following his appointment as Leader of the House of Commons.[43]
Parliamentary candidate and other roles
Rees-Mogg first entered politics at the 1997 general election at which, aged 27, he was selected as the Conservative Party candidate for Central Fife, a traditional Labour seat in Scotland. With an upper class background set against a predominantly working-class electorate, Rees-Mogg was criticised by many constituents for being too posh.[citation needed] News stories from the time ridiculed Rees-Mogg for canvassing the area with his family's nanny and touring the constituency in a Bentley, a claim that he later described as "scurrilous", stating it had been a Mercedes.[44][26] With a name recognition of less than 2%,[45] Rees-Mogg managed to gain the third-highest number of votes on election night, earning 9% of all votes cast, a figure much lower than that of previous Conservative Party candidates for the area. However, no new Conservative MPs were elected in Scotland that year; the Conservative Party suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1906, and lost all its seats in Scotland.
In 1999, when it was being rumoured that his "anachronistically posh" accent was working against his chances of being selected for a safe Conservative seat, Rees-Mogg was defended by letter writers to The Daily Telegraph, one of whom claimed that "an overt form of intimidation exists, directed against anyone who dares to eschew the current, Americanised, mode of behaviour, speech and dress".[46] Rees-Mogg himself stated (in The Sunday Times, 23 May 1999) that "it is rather pathetic to fuss about accents too much", though he then went on to say that "John Prescott's accent certainly stereotypes him as an oaf",[46] a comment which he later said he regretted and for which he apologised.[47] He later said: "I gradually realised that whatever I happened to be speaking about, the number of voters in my favour dropped as soon as I opened my mouth."[48]
Rees-Mogg was selected as the Conservative candidate for The Wrekin in Shropshire for the 2001 general election, but lost to the sitting Labour MP Peter Bradley[49] who achieved a 0.95% swing to Labour against the national trend of a 3.5% swing to the Conservatives. From 2005 to 2008, he was the elected Chairman of the Cities of London and Westminster Conservative Association
In 2006, Rees-Mogg criticised efforts by then-Leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron to increase the representation of ethnic minorities on the party candidate list, arguing that fulfilling quotas can often "make it harder for the intellectually able" and that "Ninety-five per cent of this country is White. The list can't be totally different from the country at large."[51]
In March 2009, Rees-Mogg was forced to apologise to Trevor Kavanagh, the then political editor of The Sun, after it was shown that a newsletter signed by Rees-Mogg had plagiarised sections of a Kavanagh article that had appeared in the newspaper over a month earlier.[52]
In December 2009, a pamphlet which purported to show him talking to a local constituent and calling on the government to "show more honesty" was criticised after it emerged that the "constituent" was a London-based employee of his investment firm.[53]
He was one of the directors of the Catholic Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in London who were ordered to resign by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor in February 2008 after protracted arguments over the adoption of a tighter ethical code banning non-Catholic practices such as abortions and gender reassignment surgery at the hospital.[54]
Parliament
Rees-Mogg was described by Camilla Long in a profile in The Sunday Times as "David Cameron's worst nightmare" during the 2010 general election campaign.[55] At that election Rees-Mogg became the new Member of Parliament for the new North East Somerset constituency, with a majority of 4,914 votes.[56] His sister, journalist Annunziata Rees-Mogg, stood simultaneously in neighbouring Somerton and Frome, but failed by 1,817 votes to win her seat.[26][57] In The Guardian, Ian Jack had claimed that the selection of two such highly privileged candidates had damaged the Conservative Party's message of social inclusion, and appeared to suggest that privileged candidates should be excluded.
Rees-Mogg was born in Hammersmith, London and educated at Eton College. He then studied History at Trinity College, Oxford and was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association. He worked in the City of London for Lloyd George Management until 2007, then co-founded a hedge fund management business Somerset Capital Management LLP.[1][2][3] He has amassed a significant fortune: his estimated net worth in 2016 was from £55 million to (including his wife's prospects) £150 million.[4][5] Moving into politics, he unsuccessfully contested the 1997 and 2001 general elections before being elected as the MP for North East Somerset in 2010.[6] He was reelected in 2015 and 2017, with an increased share of the vote each time. Within the Conservative Party he joined the traditionalist and socially conservative Cornerstone Group.
During the premiership of David Cameron, Rees-Mogg was one of the parliamentary Conservative Party's most rebellious members, opposing the government on issues such as the introduction of same-sex marriage. He became known for his speeches and filibustering in parliamentary debates.[clarification needed] A Eurosceptic, he proposed an electoral pact between the Conservatives and the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and campaigned for the Leave side in the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union.[7] He joined the Eurosceptic European Research Group (ERG), becoming chairman in 2018.[8] He attracted support through the social media campaign Moggmentum and was promoted as a potential successor to Prime Minister Theresa May as Leader of the Conservative Party. He however endorsed Boris Johnson in the 2019 leadership contest.[9] Johnson appointed him Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council following his election as Conservative Leader and appointment as Prime Minister.
Rees-Mogg is a controversial figure in British politics. He has been characterised as socially conservative and praised as a conviction politician whose anachronistic upper-class mannerisms and consciously traditionalist attitudes are often seen as entertaining;[10][11][12] he has been dubbed the "Honourable Member for the 18th century".[13] Critics view him as a reactionary figure, some of his positions having made him the target of organised protests
Life and career
Early life and education
Rees-Mogg was born in Hammersmith, London on 24 May 1969, the younger son of William Rees-Mogg (1928–2012), a former editor of The Times newspaper, created a life peer in 1988, and Gillian Shakespeare Morris, his wife, a daughter of Thomas Richard Morris, a Conservative party local government politician and Mayor of St Pancras in London. He was one of five children, having three elder siblings, Emma Beatrice Rees-Mogg (born 1962),[14] Charlotte Louise Rees-Mogg (born 1964)[14] and Thomas Fletcher Rees-Mogg (born 1966),[14] and one younger sister, Annunziata Rees-Mogg (born 1979).
Prior to his birth, in 1964 the family purchased Ston Easton Park, a country house near the village of Ston Easton in Somerset, where Rees-Mogg grew up attending weekly mass and occasionally Sunday school at the Church of the Holy Ghost, Midsomer Norton.[16] Here he started catechism in 1975 under his governess and attended mass in the ordinary form.[17] A few years later, in 1978, the family moved to the nearby village of Hinton Blewett where they purchased The Old Rectory, a Grade II listed former rectory, today valued at £2 million.[18] Living in Somerset, he regularly commuted to his family's second home in Smith Square, London, where he also attended independent boys' prep school Westminster Under School.[19][20]
Growing up, Rees-Mogg was primarily raised by the family's nanny Veronica Crook, whom he describes as a formative figure.[21] Crook now looks after Rees-Mogg's own children, having worked for the family for over 50 years.[22]
When Rees-Mogg was ten, he was left £50 by a distant cousin, and his father, on his behalf, invested in shares in the now-defunct General Electric Company (GEC). Rees-Mogg ascribes to this event the beginnings of his interest in stock markets. Having learned how to read company reports and balance sheets, he later attended a shareholders' meeting at GEC, where he voted against a motion because dividends were too low.[4] He subsequently invested in London-based conglomerate Lonrho, eventually owning 340 shares, and reportedly caused the company's chairman Lord Duncan-Sandys "discomfort" by quizzing him at an annual general meeting on the low dividends offered to shareholders. In 1981, at a shareholders' meeting of GEC, in which he owned 175 shares at the time, he told the chairman Lord Nelson that the dividend on offer was "pathetic", sparking amusement among board members and the media.[23]
After prep school, Rees-Mogg entered Eton College, where he was described in a school report as a "particularly dogmatic" Thatcherite.[24] Upon leaving Eton, he had his portrait painted by Paul Branson RP for the Eton College Collections, which was later put on display during the Faces of 1993 Royal Society of Portrait Painters exhibition.[
Rees-Mogg read History at Trinity College, Oxford, where he graduated with an upper second-class honours degree in 1991.[26][27] Almost immediately after arriving in 1988, Cherwell nominated him for the title of "Pushy Fresher", printing a photograph of Rees-Mogg speaking in a suit with the caption "What more need we say?".[28] While at Oxford he became president of the Oxford University Conservative Association with what Cherwell described as a "campaign for world domination and social adequacy". Rees-Mogg was a member and frequent debater at the Oxford Union and elected Librarian, but Damian Hinds defeated him for president of the Union.[29][30][28] Reflecting on his time at university, Rees-Mogg regretted not having studied Classics.[31]
Career
After graduating from the University of Oxford in 1991, Rees-Mogg worked for the Rothschild investment bank under Nils Taube before moving to Hong Kong in 1993[32] to join Lloyd George Management.[33][34] During his tenure in Hong Kong, he became a close friend of Governor Chris Patten and was a regular at Government House. Three years later, he returned to London and was put in charge of some of the firm's emerging markets funds. By 2003, he was managing a newly-established Lloyd George Emerging Markets Fund.[35] In 2007, Rees-Mogg left the company with a number of colleagues to set up their own fund management firm, Somerset Capital Management,[36] with the aid of hedge fund manager Crispin Odey. Following Rees-Mogg's election as the Member of Parliament for North East Somerset, he stepped down as chief executive of the company; however, he continues to receive income in his capacity as a partner.[32]
Somerset Capital Management is managed via subsidiaries in the tax havens of the Cayman Islands and Singapore. Rees-Mogg has defended offshore tax havens, and his vast wealth (£100,000,000+, with his wife, when she comes into her inheritance, as of November 2016)[37] has left him open to the criticism that he cannot understand the lives and concerns of many ordinary people.[38]
In 2018 Somerset Capital opened an investment fund in Dublin. The new business prospectus listed Brexit as one of the risks, as it could cause "considerable uncertainty". Rees-Mogg, a partner of the business who does not make investment decisions, defended the move, stating: "The decision to launch the fund was nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit."[39] When interviewed by Channel 4 in March 2019, Rees-Mogg declined to answer suggestions that their calculations showed that he could have earned £7 million in the period since the referendum,[40][41] and stated that the investment was made before Brexit. The Irish Times, whilst agreeing that the fund had warned of Brexit risks, noted that his actions caused 'mirth' on both sides of the Irish Sea as it still had access to the EU.[42] In July 2019, Rees-Mogg resigned from his part-time role at Somerset Capital Management following his appointment as Leader of the House of Commons.[43]
Parliamentary candidate and other roles
Rees-Mogg first entered politics at the 1997 general election at which, aged 27, he was selected as the Conservative Party candidate for Central Fife, a traditional Labour seat in Scotland. With an upper class background set against a predominantly working-class electorate, Rees-Mogg was criticised by many constituents for being too posh.[citation needed] News stories from the time ridiculed Rees-Mogg for canvassing the area with his family's nanny and touring the constituency in a Bentley, a claim that he later described as "scurrilous", stating it had been a Mercedes.[44][26] With a name recognition of less than 2%,[45] Rees-Mogg managed to gain the third-highest number of votes on election night, earning 9% of all votes cast, a figure much lower than that of previous Conservative Party candidates for the area. However, no new Conservative MPs were elected in Scotland that year; the Conservative Party suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1906, and lost all its seats in Scotland.
In 1999, when it was being rumoured that his "anachronistically posh" accent was working against his chances of being selected for a safe Conservative seat, Rees-Mogg was defended by letter writers to The Daily Telegraph, one of whom claimed that "an overt form of intimidation exists, directed against anyone who dares to eschew the current, Americanised, mode of behaviour, speech and dress".[46] Rees-Mogg himself stated (in The Sunday Times, 23 May 1999) that "it is rather pathetic to fuss about accents too much", though he then went on to say that "John Prescott's accent certainly stereotypes him as an oaf",[46] a comment which he later said he regretted and for which he apologised.[47] He later said: "I gradually realised that whatever I happened to be speaking about, the number of voters in my favour dropped as soon as I opened my mouth."[48]
Rees-Mogg was selected as the Conservative candidate for The Wrekin in Shropshire for the 2001 general election, but lost to the sitting Labour MP Peter Bradley[49] who achieved a 0.95% swing to Labour against the national trend of a 3.5% swing to the Conservatives. From 2005 to 2008, he was the elected Chairman of the Cities of London and Westminster Conservative Association
In 2006, Rees-Mogg criticised efforts by then-Leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron to increase the representation of ethnic minorities on the party candidate list, arguing that fulfilling quotas can often "make it harder for the intellectually able" and that "Ninety-five per cent of this country is White. The list can't be totally different from the country at large."[51]
In March 2009, Rees-Mogg was forced to apologise to Trevor Kavanagh, the then political editor of The Sun, after it was shown that a newsletter signed by Rees-Mogg had plagiarised sections of a Kavanagh article that had appeared in the newspaper over a month earlier.[52]
In December 2009, a pamphlet which purported to show him talking to a local constituent and calling on the government to "show more honesty" was criticised after it emerged that the "constituent" was a London-based employee of his investment firm.[53]
He was one of the directors of the Catholic Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth in London who were ordered to resign by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor in February 2008 after protracted arguments over the adoption of a tighter ethical code banning non-Catholic practices such as abortions and gender reassignment surgery at the hospital.[54]
Parliament
Rees-Mogg was described by Camilla Long in a profile in The Sunday Times as "David Cameron's worst nightmare" during the 2010 general election campaign.[55] At that election Rees-Mogg became the new Member of Parliament for the new North East Somerset constituency, with a majority of 4,914 votes.[56] His sister, journalist Annunziata Rees-Mogg, stood simultaneously in neighbouring Somerton and Frome, but failed by 1,817 votes to win her seat.[26][57] In The Guardian, Ian Jack had claimed that the selection of two such highly privileged candidates had damaged the Conservative Party's message of social inclusion, and appeared to suggest that privileged candidates should be excluded.
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