Meet the ex Tory MP who wears starched pants, has never boiled an egg and eats foie gras (but loves a Greggs eclair)
JACOB Rees-Mogg is not your usual reality TV star.
A former Tory Cabinet minister, he is worth tens of millions, has never watched the Kardashians and probably thinks the sugar hut is a chocolate shop rather than a nightclub on The Only Way Essex.
So when Jacob got an email asking his family to star in their own show, he assumed it was someone was pulling his leg.
“I thought it was a spoof”, Jacob tells me at his £6million home in Westminster.
“I thought – why would anybody want to make a programme about us?”
But this was no joke.
It was from the makers of At Home With The Furies – which follows ‘Gipsy King’ boxer Tyson Fury, wife Paris and their brood.
They wanted to do the same with the Moggs.
After discussing it, Jacob, his wife Helena (an aristocrat and heir to a £45m art collection) and six children Peter, Mary, Thomas, Anselm, Alfred, and Sixtus decide to let the cameras in.
And so, we enter Moggland.
The series kicks off with Rishi Sunak calling the election and follows the family as Jacob and the Tories are swept from power.
It is a world of country houses, smoking jackets and family heirlooms.
We meet their beloved nanny Veronica, 82, a cuddly matriarch who looked after Jacob as a newborn and is onto her second generation of Mogglets.
Unflinchingly polite and always immaculately dressed in a double breasted suit, we discover that Jacob even has his boxer shorts starched.
“He likes them quite stiff”, one of his maids declares.
His wife Helena is a wealthy aristocrat whose full name is Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair.
The daughter of the late poet Somerset de Chair and wealthy heiress Lady Juliet Tadgell, she is set to inherit her mother’s vast art collection – which includes works by the Old Master Van Dyck.
But in the show she is a sort of every mum; shepherding the kids to school and organising birthday parties while delivering witty one liners.
At one point she sounds more revolutionary Marxist than high Tory as she wryly observes the Conservatives “have gone from tragedy to farce.”
Mary, 15, the only daughter, tries to teach her dad – who was educated at Eton and then Oxford University – slang.
She has some success with the word “rizz” which a triumphant Jacob says means charismatic.
But “wasteman” has her dad perplexed. Does it mean dustman, he asks with a puzzled look. Nope – more like loser.
Every Saturday night, the family gather at their Tudor country pile in Somerset for dinner served – quite literally – on silver platters.
Men and boys are in suits, right down to little seven year-old Sixtus. Ladies don frocks.
It is more Downton Abbey than Geordie Shore.
As Jacob explains to me back at his Westminster home, cooking, cleaning and DIY are just not his thing.
“What’s the most exotic thing you have cooked?”, I ask him.
A short silence follows.
“Can you boil an egg?”
“I’m sure it can’t be that complicated can it?” Jacob replies, with a smile.
“Have you ever cooked for your wife Helena”, I persevere.
“No, good heavens, I don’t want to give her food poisoning”, the Moggster responds, flashing a grin.
Nor has he ever sewn a button or put up a shelf.
“I did try mending a ceiling light once”, Jacob volunteers.
“I had switched the mains off, and spent ages carefully looking at the wires and everything.
“It was all going perfectly and then at the end, I dropped it. It fell off the wire and smashed.”
He baulks at the suggestion he was Britain’s poshest MP (“gosh no!”), but when I ask him what his favourite meal is I have to google the answer.
“It’s Tornadoes Rossini”, Jacob declares, practically salivating.
“It is a great lump of fillet steak, with some foie gras on top sauteed…served with Pomme souffle.”
In other words – posh steak and chips.
But it isn’t all fine dining with daddy Mogg.
On the campaign trail lunch was nearly always a Greggs sandwich and chocolate eclair.
“Greggs do the most delicious chocolate eclairs”, he enthuses, “they are excellent and fresh. I have a sweet tooth.”
So what is Jacob’s position on the great cake debate? Is it jam or cream first on a scone?
“Now, the key question here is the butter”, he explains.
“If you have butter, you go butter, jam, cream.
“If you don’t have butter, then the cream is replacing the butter and therefore you have cream and then jam.
“But you can never have too many dairy products. So doctors recommend this – you may have to take a few statins in return.
Jacob was the youngest son of William Rees-Mogg, who edited The Times before becoming a peer in the House of Lords.
He is a devout Catholic.
His house in Somerset has its own chapel, and he has a jaw-dropping collection of relics.
These are bits of saints’ bodies or clothes cherished as symbols of devotion.
His most treasured possession is a piece of the hair shirt worn by Thomas More.
More was a leading religious thinker who advised Henry VIII but was beheaded in 1532 after refusing to follow the King in his break from Rome.
Mr Rees-Mogg also has a piece of the “true cross”, said to be the cross Jesus was crucified on.
“My most prized relic is my hair shirt by Thomas More because he is a great saint and the certainty of it”, Jacob explains.
He is such a fan of Thomas More that he cannot bring himself to read or watch Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall – which paints More’s great rival Thomas Cromwell in a better light.
“No no, no, no. Thomas Cromwell is a dreadful man. Cromwell is a really nasty piece of work, very destructive”, the Tory tells me.
It’s not just saints relics Jacob collects.
Hanging on his living room wall is a framed handkerchief that was dipped in the blood of Charles I at his execution in 1649.
It was owned by Colonel Sir John Penruddock – who later went on to lead a Royalist uprising.
Another prized possession is his vial of Queen Victoria’s anointing oil – a teenage gift from his father.
“I was about 15. I went back to school and people said, ‘what have you been given for Christmas?’ People had been given ghetto blasters and things like that”, Jacob recalls.
“I said ‘I’ve been given Queen Victoria’s anointing oil’, which to me was much more exciting, but I think my friends thought I was mad. I was thrilled.”
As a politician, Mr Rees-Mogg met royalty many times.
For a while he was Lord President of the Privy Council – an ancient post which meant private audiences with Queen Elizabeth II.
“You didn’t get tea and the conversation was standing up, but it was absolutely wonderful”, he says.
And before you ask – no, he never sloped off to have a sneaky look at the loo.
But he does recall one tense time where he had to climb over Extinction Rebellion blockades to get to Buckingham Palace.
“We got to the gate, which would normally be driven to, and said to a rather suspicious policeman ‘hello we are actually here from the Privy Council’”, Jacob says laughing.
“We were let in – I think our names were on a list.”
A day is a long time in politics. The five months since the election has brought massive change.
The new Labour government announced £40 billion of tax rises and farmers have been blockading Westminster with tractors.
Jacob brands Rachel Reeves a “menace” and says Labour are waging “class war” from No10.
In America, that other great reality TV star Donald Trump was elected President.
Jacob thinks Trump’s comeback could pave the way for another – Boris Johnson’s.
“I have not spoken to him about this but he must be looking at Donald Trump and thinking, look, Donald can do it, he’s 78 I’ve just turned 60 – a lot of life in me yet”, he says.
Does Jacob fancy a comeback?
“I love being involved in politics. I love being a member of parliament, if the circumstances are right, I’d love to go back.”
If Westminster is not on the cards Jacob jokes that there is another elected office he could stand for.
“I am eligible to be Pope – any Catholic male is”, Jacob says.
The Moggs do Rome – that’s series 2 sorted.
:: Meet the Rees-Moggs will stream from 2nd December on discovery+.