The Deacon's Bench
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Despite Boris Johnson’s dismal record on key social issues there can be little doubt that his election as leader of the British Conservative Party, and the consequent legal formality of his appointment as prime minister by Queen Elizabeth, constitutes a major step forward for world politics. In most ways he is the most conservative politician to hold his office in more than two decades, his election and appointment delivering a stinging defeat to Europe’s left-wing established powers and constituting his own country’s sharpest positive turn since Margaret Thatcher became prime minister exactly thirty years ago.
But while such facts are well known to politically aware Americans, the character of the devoutly Catholic and more eminently conservative British politician who has been appointed by Johnson to high office as Leader of the House of Commons and as Lord President of the Council is not—though the man in question, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is as much a political sensation in his country as Donald Trump is in ours.
Born in 1969, Rees-Mogg is of stereotypical English upper middle class lineage and education. His father, William Rees-Mogg, edited The Times for fourteen years, served as Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain for nine and received a non-hereditary life peerage as a baron. He was also of the first generation of the family to be raised as a Catholic, thanks to his Irish-American mother. Before his election to parliament in 2001 Jacob Rees-Mogg studied at Eton and at Oxford and spent two years working in finance.
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Rees-Mogg is just as unashamedly Catholic and conservative. He has six children, prays the rosary frequently and attends the Tridentine Mass (which his father had also favored, signing a petition to Pope Paul VI for its continued use alongside the reformed liturgy). When leaders of the Conservative Party were attempting to get its members of parliament to support David Cameron’s introduction of “gay marriage” Rees-Mogg stated that where moral issues are concerned he takes his lead from the Holy See. One of his children is named after Saint Alephege of Canterbury, whom Rees-Mogg sees as model of opposition to unjustly high taxation. Another is named for the staunchly royalist Earl of Stafford, who was beheaded by seventeenth century Puritans and was an ancestor of his wife. Asked what he thought about being called “the member of parliament for the early twentieth century” he said he doesn’t understand why the term is applied to him since “the twentieth century is so modern” and that he should be called “the member for the early eighteenth century.”
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