‘Meet the Rees-Moggs’, Discovery+’s reality series, offers a British twist on The Kardashians, chronicling Jacob Rees-Mogg, his aristocratic family, and his failed 2024 election campaign. With echoes of Victorian privilege and modern libertarian ideals, the series juxtaposes Rees-Mogg’s genteel demeanour and staunch beliefs with the opulent, often caricatured backdrop of his life. Equal parts curiosity and critique, it explores class, celebrity, and the peculiar politics of a divisive, enduring figure.
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By Matthew Brooker and Paul J. Davies ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
The British version of The Kardashians was never likely to be a lowbrow festival of bling like the original. That doesn’t mean that Meet the Rees-Moggs is unfaithful to the spirit of its US forbear. The appeal of reality TV, for those who partake, is the opportunity to gawp at the lives of people who are very different from the average. And Jacob Rees-Mogg, the fogyish former Conservative member of parliament who was unseated in this year’s Labour landslide, is certainly very much unlike most of his fellow Britons.
UK media have lapped up the Discovery+ streaming series, which follows its top hat-wearing protagonist, his aristocratic wife Helena and six children through an unsuccessful campaign to retain his rural, southwestern English constituency in July’s election. Rees-Mogg acknowledges the show’s debt early on, saying it “will be a different kettle of fish to The Kardashians.” Whether audiences will display the same enthusiasm is open to question. As of the first quarter, Discovery+ reached 3.1 million homes in the UK, the market where the show is most likely to find an audience; the Kardashian family vehicle’s fifth-season premiere, shown on Hulu in the US, drew almost 4 million global viewers.
Then again, Rees-Mogg’s retro personality displays some distinctly modern trends that may chime with US viewers. The 55-year-old’s Conservative belief system has similarities with the neo-reactionary worldview espoused by technology billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Musk, an avowed pronatalist with 11 children, would no doubt approve of the Rees-Mogg brood. A desire to disrupt and shrink institutions and government is also a common aim.
These parallels are no accident. Rees-Mogg’s father co-wrote a book in the late 1990s that became a seminal text among the libertarian tech bros of Silicon Valley. Thiel has long been a champion of the book, The Sovereign Individual, and even wrote a preface to a 2020 reissue. It predicted the end of nation states as an organizing principle and the rise of smart, energetic information workers who would live beyond the reach of governments and taxation.
In Britain, Rees-Mogg cuts an idiosyncratic figure, with an embrace of the antiquated trappings of privilege that verges on caricature. As a teenager at Oxford University in the late 1980s, he “instantly became an unmissable sight, a rail-thin teenager promenading along Broad Street dressed like a Victorian vicar, in a double-breasted suit with an umbrella,” wrote Simon Kuper in Chums, an account of Britain’s Oxford-educated elite. In a French TV program from 1982, a 12-year-old Rees-Mogg is shown trading shares from a car phone inside a chauffeured Rolls-Royce; speaking of his love of money; typing a letter on a manual typewriter to Margaret Thatcher; and reading the Financial Times while bemoaning a Conservative byelection defeat with father William, who was editor of The Times.
On the evidence of Meet the Rees-Moggs, Jacob has mellowed. He comes across as amiable and courteous: reacting agreeably as voters lob the occasional insult; celebrating a scion’s birthday under the oil paintings and oak paneling of his 400-year-old Somerset mansion; speaking deliberately bad French on a family holiday. Rees-Mogg brings the same civility to answers about his political beliefs: He sought a “proper” (meaning hardline) Brexit; he opposes abortion even in the case of rape and incest (he’s Roman Catholic); Boris Johnson is a “great man,” while he admires the anti-immigration populist Nigel Farage. These positions, often delivered in the tone of a stern Victorian moralist, have made Rees-Mogg a divisive figure — adored by many on the right of the Conservative Party, frequently detested at other points on the political spectrum.
Order and separation are running themes. Britain’s rigid class system, which is often thought to be fading into insignificance, is alive and well in his world. The contrast between the posh accents of the Rees-Mogg household and the west country twangs of the family’s servants is painfully acute. Rees-Mogg’s ease and good humor implicitly say: This is all as it should be. Brexit, remember, was an act of separating the country and its hierarchy from interfering Brussels bureaucrats.
That echoes the thesis of his father’s book. One vision of Brexit was to turn London into “Singapore-on-Thames” — a deregulated, hyper-competitive quasi city-state where wealthy entrepreneurs would flock to benefit from minimal rules and low taxes. Across the pond, Thiel and Musk sponsor visions of a libertarian future of cryptocurrencies and Martian colonies — partly funded, of course, by government contracts for their companies Palantir Technologies Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or Space-X. On both sides, the ironies run deep.
Arguably, a TV program modeled on an unabashed celebration of vacuous celebrity is the logical end point for a politician whose true talent was in creating a public persona. Rees-Mogg’s fame outstrips his achievements as an MP and minister, which are relatively slight. The most memorable moment of his parliamentary career was when he lay down on the benches of the House of Commons during a Brexit debate in 2019. That display of patrician entitlement drew a “sit up, man!” admonishment from a female Labour MP. It’s an underwhelming legacy for a guy who was once, briefly, favorite to be the next Conservative leader.
There’s an undeniable curiosity in witnessing the private life of this oddest of British political characters, even if it wanes quickly (was five episodes really necessary?). The question is whether Rees-Mogg’s venture into television leads anywhere. TV doesn’t always the signal the twilight of a political career. Farage, leader of the Reform Party and bane of the Conservatives, appeared in the reality show I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2023 — before finally becoming an MP at the eighth attempt in July’s election.
So Meet the Rees-Moggs may not be the end for its hero, in the unlikely event it becomes a hit in America. Reality TV as a springboard to political power? Perish the thought.
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© 2024 Bloomberg L.P.
