When Sir Jacob and Lady Helena Rees-Mogg were invited by email to star in their own reality TV show, the former cabinet minister and his wife assumed it was a hoax.
“It was the kind of email you get from, you know …” Rees-Mogg says.
“A fake Nigerian prince?” Helena adds helpfully.
“Yes, one of those.”
The sender was, in fact, the television production company that made At Home with the Furys, a fly-on-the-wall series about Tyson Fury, the Gypsy King boxer, his wife, Paris, and their six children, Venezuela, Prince John, Prince Tyson, Prince Adonis, Valencia and Athena. What better family to help repeat the success of The Furys than the Rees-Moggs with their six children — Peter Theodore Alphege, Mary Anne Charlotte Emma, Thomas Wentworth Somerset Dunstan, Anselm Charles Fitzwilliam, Alfred Wulfric Leyson Pius and Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher — named after medieval monks, saints and bishops?
Naturally the producers weren’t expecting the Rees-Mogg children to drink Dr Pepper from baby bottles, yell “Shit!” or flick V-signs, but for different reasons Meet the Rees-Moggs could be every bit as eye-opening and intriguing, they reasoned.
The Discovery+ series stars Rees-Mogg, 55, he of staunch Eurosceptic views and cut-glass accent, and his formidable other half, Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair, 47, daughter of the late poet and aristocrat Somerset de Chair and Lady Juliet Tadgell, 89, along with their Waltons-sized family, plus assorted other characters including the butler and cider-maker Shaun Goodwin, Daisy the cocker spaniel and a pair of robot lawnmowers.
“I can watch them on my iPhone, whizzing around the garden,” Rees-Mogg says gleefully.
The five episodes span the period of relative calm before the election through Rishi Sunak’s announcement of the surprise July 4 poll to hectic campaigning, the Conservatives’ catastrophic defeat and Rees-Mogg’s loss of his North East Somerset and Hanham seat, where a 16,000 majority dissolved into a 5,000 deficit. He lost to the Labour mayor of the West of England, Dan Norris, whom he had beaten in 2010.
He has hopes of a comeback. “I would love to stand again as an MP, as long as I am reselected by my constituency,” he says. He backed Robert Jenrick in the Conservative leadership contest, who offered Rees-Mogg the job of party chairman if he won. He likes Kemi Badenoch and thinks she’ll do a “magnificent job”.
On the face of it, the Rees-Moggs’ genteel world, centred around Gournay Court — the nine-bedroom, 17th-century country house they bought for £2.9 million in 2010 among apple orchards in the village of West Harptree, Somerset — is as far as you can imagine from the sequinned, spray-tanned, potty-mouthed, designer-handbag world of the Morecambe-dwelling Furys. But there are similarities.
Helena, like Paris, is the matriarch keeping the whole show on the road — and there are plenty of “Did I just hear that correctly?” moments. In a preview of the first episode, a pair of housemaids tackle a pile of Rees-Mogg’s laundry. “He does like his boxers being ironed — everything but socks,” says one, pressing his underpants. “He likes it quite stiff, doesn’t he, Jacob?” the other says with a giggle, as starch is sprayed liberally on undergarments to “make them crispier”.
One confesses she felt terrified when she passed him on the stairs on her first day, only to discover later he was a bit of a softy. “Don’t I pay you enough? You’ve got holes in your clothes,” he pretends to scold when she appears at work in ripped jeans.
“It’s the style now,” she blushes.
Shaun also regards the master of the house as a soft touch, confiding: “He will sit and eat jelly and ice cream along with the kids.”
Veronica Crook is the family’s long-serving nanny, who has changed two generations of Rees-Mogg nappies. She started work with Jacob’s father, Sir William Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times, aged 22 and recalls her first glimpse of young Jacob in his birthday suit. “We saw him the day he was born in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, and there he was, like a little frog. Jacob wasn’t a placid baby by any means. If he squawked enough, somebody went to his aid.”
But the star is Helena, a former master of the Mendip Farmers Hunt, without whom the show probably would not work. I’m sipping coffee from bone china in Gournay Court’s splendid drawing room. Scattered around are paintings from the Fitzwilliam art collection owned by Helena’s mother, Lady Juliet, estimated to be worth £40 million and which, the show tells us, she stands to inherit. They include portraits of Helena’s ancestors, Thomas Wentworth and the 1st Marquess of Rockingham.
The Rees-Moggs also have a five-storey house just behind Westminster Abbey where they spend weekdays. The three youngest are at day schools in London, the eldest — Peter, Mary and Thomas — at boarding schools.
Helena is robustly un-PC, with a self-deprecating sense of humour and spot-on comic timing. The series opens with her declaring: “I hope I don’t get a cease and desist letter from Johnnie Boden — ‘Could you please not wear my clothes, you awful, Tory, right-wing, foxhunting Brexiteer?’ ”
Her response when militants painted “Scum” on the family Land Rover Discovery was: “At least they could have said ‘Tory scum’.” Asked whether Sixtus would be getting a younger brother or sister (Paris Fury had a seventh after At Home with the Furys), she replied firmly: “I’m done. There will be no Septimus or Octopus.”
She trained as a chemist at Bristol University with plans to become a helicopter pilot until “university work, marriage and children” got in the way. Disillusioned with the idea of a research job “wearing a white coat and safety goggles” all week, she moved to London to work for a business magazine covering the oil and gas industry. She was introduced to Jacob by Annunziata Mary Rees-Mogg, his sister and a former Brexit Party MEP, and was besotted.
“We got together about July 2005,” she recalls. “Jacob would call it courting. And if I’m honest, I couldn’t really think about anything else other than Jacob at that stage. We had a very nice dinner and afterwards he said, ‘You should marry me, you know, but I want lots of children.’ I said, ‘Great, so do I.’ He said, ‘We can have a cricket team.’ ”
Jacob beams when I bring it up. “I’m very lucky to have a wife and six glorious children who are my pride and joy.”
We move from the drawing room into the dining room, where Shaun and his wife, Julie, are serving beef, Yorkshire pud, roast potatoes and parsnips, with the option of fishcakes for pescatarians. I’m sitting next to Alfred, eight, who’s wearing not tailcoat and pinstripes but a blue Manchester City top. When the ketchup arrives at the table it’s not in a squeezy bottle but a tiny ramekin dish — which, as every youngster including Alfred knows, can’t possibly hold enough.
Sixtus, seven, the youngest, has a box of party cracker jokes and is testing them on guests. Sample: “Why was Mrs Cookie so sad?”
“Was it because she’d used all her dough?” Rees-Mogg ventures.
“No, she was feeling crummy.”
“Sixtus is delighted to have visitors,” Rees-Mogg explains. “He’s got someone to test his jokes on and because we have guests he’s excused from doing his catechism.”
Mary, 16, loves riding. She has just graduated from a pony called Buster to Kinder, an Irish mare. She’s keen to join an equestrian team but is currently revising for exams. Has Mary done her GCSE homework, Helena asks. “I’ve done my French, I’ve got Latin to do,” she says.
Not present are Anselm, 12, who is staying over at a friend’s house. Thomas, 14, is at school, as is Peter, 17, who goes to Eton. Earlier this year Peter received hate mail sent to him at school, and the incident clearly shook his father.
“He got it this summer, before this programme had been announced,” Rees-Mogg explains. “The hate mail did make me think about how aggressive the modern world is to children of politicians. I went into politics long before I was married or had children, but somebody aged 40 who has a couple of children will certainly think twice about [going into politics]. The hate mail concerned me. I thought that was unreasonable. Send me hate mail, that’s fine, that’s part of political life. But to send it to a child?”
Did he hand the hate mail to the police? “No. What would the police do?”
Was Peter upset by it? “He took it in his stride. I probably minded more than he did.”
So why on earth did Sir Jacob and Lady Helena agree to open their home to a film crew? “If the children had up to now been anonymous then, of course, I would have thought very hard and probably would not have gone ahead,” he says. “As it was, the surname Rees-Mogg is enough to draw attention to them. Like it or not, they are already recognised. And, of course, they were entirely free to decide [whether to participate] and, as it turned out, were all happy to take part with various degrees of enthusiasm.”
Does his contract with Optomen TV give him editing rights? “It’s more about, er” — he takes sip of coffee and swallows hard — “goodwill,” he says uneasily. Sometimes you have to take a risk and trust your instincts, he adds, describing Meet the Rees-Moggs as “more Fawlty Towers than Downton Abbey”.
“I had a number of conversations with them, and the thing that swayed me was when they explained that if in the first episode you think somebody is a complete monster, why would you watch more?”
“A horrified fascination?” suggests Helena, who has a knack for one-liners.
A reason the Rees-Moggs decided to go full Kardashian, they explain, was to let in sunlight. People are entitled to dislike them and their ilk, Rees-Mogg points out, but at least they should see things from their point of view before rushing to judgment and daubing graffiti on his house and car — as has happened, several times. “When they find out that what goes on behind the walls of Gournay Court is not so different to their own home, they may pause for thought,” he says.
Another simple reason is that the Rees-Moggs got paid, though he won’t reveal how much. Considerations of taste and decorum came first, he insists. “I would not go on I’m a Celebrity for any amount of money,” he insists. “This was a question of whether it was something interesting and sensible to do.”
“Sensible for who and interesting for who remains open,” Helena, who seems a lot more dubious about the whole idea, interjects.
He agrees that the extra income has helped balance the household budget — outgoings include salaries for five domestic staff and six lots of school fees. He describes Labour’s imposition of VAT as petty class politics that he thinks will backfire because of the knock-on demand for places at state schools.
Given events of the recent months, the TV show has proved a wise decision, financially speaking. Not only did Jacob lose his “safe” constituency seat but, in another blow, Somerset Capital, the company he co-founded and in which he retained a shareholding, closed its doors after losing its main client, St James’s Place.
He kept his job as a four-nights-a-week presenter on GB News, worth an estimated £100,000 a year. “I lost the election on the Thursday and on the Monday I had a job to go to — a very fortunate position compared to some,” he says.
The Rees-Moggs appear still to be not too badly off, but in the best asset-rich, cash-poor tradition of Britain’s fraying aristocracy, things are looking a little threadbare. They may soon be down to their last million. In their kitchen are some beaten-up appliances and a range cooker that’s seen better days. His main car is a 2017 Jaguar XJ, from an era before the swish electric cars that modern politicians are chauffeured around in.
Could he sell one of his Bentleys? He has a silver 1968 T1, once owned by the cricketer Gubby Allen, and one from 1936, a 3.5-litre in Tory blue. As befits their age, they are driven for special occasions, mainly to church and village fêtes, he says. Sadly he could auction both and it wouldn’t pay his bills for more than a couple of months, given the depressed state of the vintage car market.
What about flogging a Van Dyck from his mother-in-law’s art collection? A car boot sale of Dutch masters would be in the best tradition of rakish, Jag-driving aristos. Or might that prompt Helena to divorce him? “Divorce no, murder yes,” he quips.
In the eyes of many Rees-Mogg is a cartoon toff, Lord Snooty from The Beano. In cabinet he was in charge of Brexit opportunities and government efficiency but was dubbed “minister for the 18th century” for his efforts to turn back the clock. His predilection for arcane English and support for individual liberty and loosening state controls earned comparisons to William Gladstone. Close up, the impression he gives is of someone transported from the era before Britain joined the EEC in 1973. He drinks old-fashioned instant coffee and is never seen out of formal attire, even at weekends.
After Covid he encouraged civil servants to return to work by leaving passive-aggressive notes saying “Sorry you were out when I visited. I look forward to seeing you in the office very soon.” He instructed Cabinet Office staff to purge their vocabulary of “dreadful weasel words” that had crept into the language from the other side of the Atlantic. “ ‘Unacceptable’ is used when people mean ‘wrong’ but they don’t have the courage to say so. If you mean something’s wrong, say it’s wrong.” He also banned “impacted” — “unless it’s a wisdom tooth”.
Is it fair to say that Rees-Mogg is sometimes guilty of provoking zealots? “I’m afraid, and this is probably a sin, I quite enjoy winding people up,” he admits.
Recently, when Caribbean government ministers renewed calls for reparations from Britain over its historical role in slavery, Rees-Mogg tweeted: “They ought to pay us for ending slavery. It is not something any other country had done and we were motivated by Christian charity.”
He’s a devout Catholic, Mass on Saturday evening or Sunday morning is a family ritual and he believes that abortion is indefensible. He shows me round Gournay Court’s chapel, genuflecting as we enter. Visiting priests come to celebrate Mass and over the years it has become a proper oratory with altar and seats donated by a nearby church that closed.
A recurring theme in the series is the attacks on the Rees-Moggs by people who claim they are rightfully protesting against pernicious social privilege but who on the face of it look like bigots. At the start of the series class war protesters ambush the family outside their London home, jostling them and yelling “Wanker!” Later, Rees-Mogg’s 85-year-old mother, Gillian, has “Posh twat” scrawled on a sign in her front garden. Sean, who doubles as a handyman, goes to scrub off the offending words. “A bit of petrol will always do the trick,” he says, revealing his experience at the task. “Even on paint or permanent marker.”
Filmed out canvassing before the election, Rees-Mogg is stalked by a campaigner called David Leverton, founder of Mogg Watch, who is stoking anti-Tory opinion in the hope of seeing him ousted as MP. “People who have a superficial view of Rees-Mogg view him as something of a comic character, therefore they think he’s unthreatening,” Leverton tells the camera. “But almost everything he stands for is bad. He seems to despise people who are poorer than … him.”
When I ask Rees-Mogg about this criticism he shakes his head. “It’s a characteristic of the left that they assume, if you don’t agree with them, that you are a bad person. I don’t think that left-wing people are bad people. I just think they’ve got answers that don’t work. As for the claim I despise poor people, as a constituency MP you are mainly working for people who are not very well off, you’re helping them get more support, with housing or with benefits issues.”
One surprising thing in the TV series, given the hostility he and his family have endured, is that Rees-Mogg was happy to wander round his constituency, chatting to passers-by without security. I point out that Nigel Farage declines to hold constituency meetings in Clacton for security reasons. “Nigel thinks I’m completely bonkers,” he says. “I think England is still very safe.”
Rees-Mogg reminds me he has also experienced worse. His father, William, was on an IRA hit list while editor of The Times. The family had an armoured safe room at home in Hinton Blewett, Somerset. When two IRA suspects were on the loose, he recalls arriving home as a 21-year-old to find armed police surrounding the house.
“I’ve always taken the view that if there’s some threat from a terrorist organisation the security services will pick it up and suddenly there’ll be security,” he says. “You can’t possibly give every member of parliament permanent security. It would be disproportionate.”
If he returns to politics his aim will be to stop the Conservative Party from “following fashionable thinking” and to return it to its principles. He believes it ignored the electorate’s concerns, particularly over taxation and immigration (both too high).
To win another election, the party has to “look at where our votes went”, he says. “Our vote roughly halved to seven million. Of the votes we lost about four million went to Reform and 2.3 million stayed at home. So those are the obvious votes to go after.” He is in favour of forging an “arrangement” with Reform and Nigel Farage. “Nigel represents what we’ve been discussing — the view of a lot of people that the Conservatives hadn’t been conservative and let them down.”
Over lunch he rails about the left-wing politics of Mary’s classes. “She’s being taught people shouldn’t buy cheap T-shirts because they’re made in factories where people don’t get paid enough. There’s nothing about how we need to buy cheap T-shirts because international trade has reduced poverty from 50 per cent of the global population to under 10 per cent since 1990.”
Helena: “But what if you’re the one in the Bangladeshi factory with no air conditioning?”
Jacob: “You starve otherwise. So which do you choose?”
At which point everyone at the table stares guiltily at their plates.
All episodes of Meet the Rees-Moggs are on Discovery+ from December 2