The one big problem with Meet The Rees-Moggs

That seemed the only plausible reason why he signed up to make a reality show, Meet The Rees-Moggs, on Britain’s lowest-rent streamer, Discovery+ (other current reality shows include Milf Manor and Naked and Afraid of Love; no nudity was gratifyingly a dealbreaker in Rees-Mogg’s contract). The Rees-Moggs are not short of a bob or two, that’s for sure – episode one makes clear very early on that wife Helena de Chair is heiress to a £45m fortune.

For Discovery+ the hope is that it will generate a bit of interest – it is at constant pains to remind you that Rees-Mogg is “one of Britain’s most controversial politicians”. And the model is a sort of The Kardashians, where drama comes from eye-gouging, hospital-requiring rumpuses over whether to serve bellinis at an upcoming eyeliner launch (note: your correspondent has never seen The Kardashians).

But from the first episode, both parties have a problem it’s going to be very difficult to overcome: Meet The Rees-Moggs is painfully, eyewateringly, brain-addlingly boring.

Firstly, and most obviously, because there is no jeopardy. The first episode pretty much begins with a general election being called and Jacob Rees-Mogg hitting the campaign trail. News clips are interspersed throughout. Will he cling on to his seat in the face of a popular Labour opponent and an electorate on the turn? Well, we know this, because if he did he wouldn’t be making this very dull show.

Watching Rishi Sunak call the election in the pouring rain, Rees-Mogg (whose iPlayer login, if you ever need it, is ‘Vote Conservative’) is chipper. “When it rains at a wedding it’s a good omen, so I’m hoping it’s also true of a political announcement,” he says. He expects to win. As does his ever-loyal PA Margaret, who says of opponent Dan Norris, without a hint of irony, “he’s very pleased with himself”.

Even in the face of voter apathy, Rees-Mogg maintains his stiff upper lip. One man in the street tells him he won’t be voting for him because of the Tories’ lurch to the right. “I’d have liked us to have taken a lurch to the right, but I don’t think we have,” says Rees-Mogg, wearing an oversized rosette rarely seen outside cartoons. “But nice to meet you!”.

And his family are confident too. “I’ve never even heard of somebody losing their job,” says son Anselm, 12, one of his six children.

Secondly, because of the lack of much going on, the camera has to find things to gaze on for long, lingering shots to show what cards the Rees-Moggs are. Here’s Jacob buying a ham and cheese baguette from Gregg’s! Here are the portraits of Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson on his constituency office wall! Here’s a very lengthy shot of silverware being polished by the family’s Terracotta Army of staff to within a very inch of its life!

And then we get to meet the rest of the Rees-Mogg Universe. There’s those upstairs: nanny Veronica, who has known him from birth. “Jacob was never a placid baby,” she says. “If he squawked enough, somebody would come to his aid.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, Rees-Mogg might say, if he didn’t so abhor those Europeans. 

And there’s those downstairs – the women charged with starching Rees-Mogg’s boxer shorts, and Shaun, who cleans his car and makes his cider. Shaun is the only one who shows a brief sense of how absurd this all is when, scrubbing the words ‘posh twat’ from a sign outside Rees-Mogg’s mother’s house, tells the camera how he would have done it in a more permanent way if, you know, he was that way inclined.

And thirdly, because everyone’s just so ludicrous. Meet the Rees-Moggs is the British aristocracy as envisaged by a half-witted Californian influencer. They’re straight out of the pages of the Beano circa 1963. Robert Harris once said: “The absurd Rees-Mogg always reminds me of a line in Le Carre: ‘He was a barmaid’s dream of a gentleman’.”

Properly posh people wear Barbour jackets and wellingtons and hang around Columbia Road flower market in Hackney annoying the locals. Rees-Mogg calls his son Sixtus “Old Bean” and insists everyone dresses in formal attire for dinner on a Saturday night even though it’s just them and they’re at home. “He doesn’t like posh food, mind,” says Shaun. “Not a fan of vegetables or anything like that.” Inevitably, gammon is served as Rees-Mogg treats his children to a quiz on Catholicism.

There are four more episodes of this. In the next one – spoiler alert! – Rees-Mogg will lose his seat. And in the remaining three, presumably, will put himself through a series of contrived and thoroughly lifeless scenarios designed by the Discovery+ producers to wring whatever they can out of this trite, tedious and completely ill-conceived show.

One thing to note: Rees-Mogg’s children, who he has decided to put front-of-camera throughout do, despite it all, come across as relatively well-balanced and normal. Which is good to know, as they’ll make up a third of the Cabinet in roughly 30 years’ time.

Meet The Rees-Moggs is streaming on Discovery+