TV review: Meet the Rees-Moggs is enjoyable television — but I know I shouldn't like it
Jacob Rees-Mogg arriving for a screening of new Discovery+ reality series Meet the Rees-Moggs, at Warner House, London. Picture date: Monday November 25, 2024. PA Photo. Photo credit should read: Ian West/PA Wire
(Discovery+) is ridiculously enjoyable television. For a few episodes anyway.
I paid the €4.99 monthly fee because it has Jacob Rees-Mogg in it and I like him when I know I shouldn’t.
Rees-Mogg is the now former Tory MP, a pro-Brexit, anti-immigrant super toff who is using a P.G. Wodehouse book as the script for his life.
Here we see him with wife Helena and their six kids in what must count as the opposite of a reality TV show.
Most of that genre now has perma-tanned chavs in their underwear on an island.
This is set between the Rees-Moggs' elegant town-house in London (he walks to parliament) and a perfect Somerset mansion in a chocolate box village thought up by Agatha Christie; Helena’s full name is Helena Anne Beatrice Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair; their sixth child is called Sixtus.
Jacob is running for re-election but that’s just a back-drop to the domestic chaos.
There is no point in having a huge mansion if your kids follow you everywhere, although this is where Helena gets to shine.
She’s super-wry English, emotions so thoroughly suppressed that I wouldn’t like to be there when she eventually blows her top.
She’s also very funny, predicting Jacob’s electoral demise with a kind of “what do you expect” candour.
My 10-year-old came in while I was watching all this and basically saw himself.
Yes, Sixtus and brothers (one is called Anselm) are little gentlemen in cricket tops, but like my son they like nothing better than Nintendo, Eminem and a scatter of poo jokes.
Daddy’s big job and important friends are kept in the background.
They all head off to Boris Johnson’s 60th birthday party, but we’re left outside, parked up in a lay-by with Shaun the family butler-chauffeur-cider maker.
Shaun is superb telly, fond of his employers, loyal to them but aware that it’s all a bit ridiculous.
When a Rees-Mogg election poster is defaced outside Jacob's mother’s house with the words ‘Posh Tw*t’, Shaun is sent to sort it out.
Rather than getting a new poster, he scrubs the words off the old one, muttering bitterly about the person who insulted his master.
The show is shot beautifully, this is aristo-porn at its finest.
Rees-Mogg takes his electoral rejection with plenty of Dunkirk ‘lets crack on’ energy, until the mask slips leaving the count centre, where he strides ahead of his high-heeled wife as she struggles to keep up.
This is a carefully curated version of the Rees-Moggs. But if you like watching Posh People, you’ll love watching this.
