IF Jacob Rees-Mogg MP didn't exist, there wouldn't be a rush to invent him.
Not even by the Tory high command, rumoured to be in a state of some despondency when this relic of Conservative times past won a Somerset marginal on their behalf last year.
Young Jacob, you see, gives the carefully burnished image of modern, listening conservatism a bit of a bad name being an unreconstructed tax-slashing, Europhobic posh boy with a hinterland in what that nice Vince Cable once called”casino banking”. Running a hedge fund, as the country found to its cost in 2008, is not the horticulturally cuddly pursuit the moniker might suggest.
Not to worry, Jacob has found pastures new to annoy. To wit, Scotland. Now let’s get this straight. Rees-Mogg Jnr is not the sort of chap who only comes north in August to kill things and wear a borrowed kilt well hung with a dead badger. Not a bit of it. Why, back in 1997, he spent weeks in the former mining stronghold of Fife as – pause for vertical lifting in the eyebrow department –the Conservative candidate in Willie Hamilton’s old fiefdom, Fife Central. Mr Hamilton, then three years too young to birl in his grave at the enormity of the insult, was, happily, living in distant Lincoln as Jacob toured his old stomping ground in a low key kind of way. Just the ever dependable Bentley for wheels, and the ever dependable former nanny for encouragement and leaflet duties in the meaner streets. In the event, and in a neat piece of electoral synergy, Jacob was favoured with a massive nine per cent of the vote, exactly matching the percentage of unemployed central Fifers at that juncture.
I bring you this brief political history lesson only because Mr Rees-Mogg has once more donned his tartan rosette to intervene in the passage of the Scotland Bill which had its third reading yesterday. This piece of legislation, as we know, has been garlanded with all manner of hopeful amendments during its parliamentary journey, most of them relating to economic powers. Wur Jacob is fishing in deeper constitutional waters.
He has been surveying proposals for an independence referendum and it has come to him, in a Damascene Eton-ish sort of way, that it is up to him to save the Union and all who sail in her. Thus, in that helpful manner some of our betters employ when helping us dimmer citizens navigate life’s vicissitudes, Mr Rees-Mogg has not only tabled a timetable for a referendum, and determined that Westminster will run it, but, he thoughtfully arranged the wording of it. I paraphrase of course , but it is along the lines of “would you prefer to have the incredibly generous, though possibly ill-advised, new measures of devolution proposed by those who know best, or would you like to risk the future of your unborn in the uncharted waters of separatism?. Happily the Commons declined to debate it. Shame!
Still we can’t pin all this tomfoolery on wee Jacob. After all, on the matter of a referendum, his Scottish Tory cousins are behaving in a fashion which makes headless chickens seem a model of logic and propriety. They were for one. Then not. Then wanted two. Wanted one now. But not yet. The result would be binding. Or not. Or maybe depending whether the lieges voted in the “right” way.
The Liberal Democrat Michael Moore, the current possessor of that toom tabard, The Scotland Office, has been consistently inconsistent and seeming oblivious to his own party’s history. His deputy, Scotland’s solitary Tory MP David Mundell’s inflammatory contribution to the debate, has been to suggest the Supreme Court in London might be invoked if the Scots don’t do as they’re tellt.
You’d think you could trust a man in a rural constituency not to whip out a red flag every time he sees a bull. You’d think he might remember that the reason he’s a Scottish Tory rump (sic) is because his party screwed up royally over devolution the first time round.
Tell me this, and tell me no more, David. Promise me Jacob’s not writing your script.
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