What is Jacob Rees-Mogg looking to achieve with his new TV show? - David Behrens
Michael Portillo is an unlikely trendsetter, traversing the country as he does on the little trains that trundle through the backwaters of BBC2, his Victorian railway timetable poking from his orange trousers.
In the 1980s when he was in charge of the entire network as Margaret Thatcher’s transport minister, he stopped British Rail from closing the line to Carlisle from Settle in the Yorkshire Dales. Maybe he saw it would come in handy for making TV programmes in his later career.
I interviewed him for The Yorkshire Post at the Ilkley Literature Festival one year and asked whether there were any requirements common to TV presenting and politics. An innate need to be liked, perhaps?
Portillo was among the first modern politicians to drift into a career in what might loosely be termed showbusiness. Ed Balls and Robert Kilroy-Silk also tried it with greater or lesser success. But Jacob Rees-Mogg is by far the unlikeliest Westminster emigré to land a TV show.
Even for someone who seems to court ridicule as he does, one wonders what he has to gain from allowing cameras “unprecedented access” to his family as they gad about their 17th century mansion, flaunting their poshness and rendering our latent resentment tangible. It can’t just be the money: the aristocratic Mrs Rees-Mogg alone is worth £45m, apparently. And who does the Discovery network think will pay £4 a month to watch such foppery?
But you can imagine the cogs whirring away inside that Edwardian brain of his: if he can no longer wield influence in government perhaps he can do so on TV? And in a world in which professional politicians are held in such low regard, in which America can choose the TV pulpiteer Donald Trump over the impassioned voices on Capitol Hill, he might just be right.
That’s not to say, of course, that anyone will see him as a serious contender. It will take a lot more than reality TV to make Rees-Mogg relatable. But the small screen is a portal to popularity that parliament never was – and the demarcation line between the two worlds is becoming increasingly blurred.
Would, for instance, Boris Johnson have enjoyed the pre-Covid popularity that swept him to power had he not allowed himself to be sent up on Have I Got News For You? It was the perfect platform to put across his particular brand of chummy fallibility and people seemed to like it.
Boris was as close as we’ve come to electing a TV character to Number 10. But as his trajectory demonstrated, personality is ultimately no substitute for policy or probity.
So his elevation was a failed experiment. But after so many disastrous leadership elections on both sides of the House, there are some in Westminster who believe the next generation of power brokers will be TV folk whose popularity is already established and whose rhetoric strikes a chord with a broad cross-section of voters. Jeremy Clarkson, Ian Hislop, Carol Vorderman and the money-saving expert Martin Lewis are among those who would, if they wanted, be welcomed with open arms into one of the main parties, fast-tracked into a safe seat and promoted swiftly through the ranks.
Hislop, who also owes his high profile to Have I Got News For You?, is the least likely to be inveigled. He could have chosen politics years ago, had he wished, and probably carried less clout. As it is, he enjoys a unique position in British life which he was able to exploit last week when he told the Archbishop of Canterbury to his face what the rest of us were thinking: that he was a sanctimonious hypocrite who presided for so long over a monstrous culture of child abuse in the Church of England and showed so little contrition.
Boris took a swing at Justin Welby, too, attributing Britain’s obesity crisis to the Church’s failure to give people the spiritual guidance to stop stuffing themselves. But Johnson is a busted flush, reduced to writing columns for a newspaper. Only a windbag would do that. I should know.
So who else could join Clarkson and Co in being encouraged to extend their media careers into Downing Street? And how quickly can their agents get them booked on Have I Got News For You?
They don’t even need to state their party affiliations, if indeed they have any, because both Labour and the Tories have shown themselves pliable enough to bend their policies around whoever is currently their leader. It’s not conviction politicians like Thatcher or Attlee they need; it’s anyone voters will like for long enough to see them through to the next election.
Two years ago that might have been Phillip Schofield. Come 2029, who knows? Gary Lineker must have time on his hands these days.