Jacob Rees-Mogg Brideshead Fan, Up to a Point

The Daily Mail recently published a profile of Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. He is a leading Euro-skeptic and has been called The Honourable Member for the 18th Century as well as a back bench Bertie Wooster. He might also be named as the Party’s “Chief Toff” if there were such a position. He represents the Somerset North East constituency which includes Midsomer Norton, ancestral home of Evelyn Waugh’s family. According to the Mail

There’s much about Rees-Mogg that’s predictable: the manners, the grace, the full complement of newspapers on the fireside Ottoman. He drives around the high-hedged narrow roads of Somerset in a 1936 Bentley, kids spilling around in the back without seatbelts (‘you don’t have to fuss about with car seats which are impossible, fiddly and annoying’), and reads international treaties in his spare time (‘So much easier now they’re all online’). Other things are unexpected — I’m amazed that he hasn’t read the ultimate young fogey novel, Brideshead Revisited, but he did watch it on television, even collecting coupons from a newspaper and sending off for the box-set.

It is perhaps foregiveable that he hasn’t read Brideshead in the original, but some one needs to have a word with him about the seatbelts. It seems unlikely that he would have had his vintage car refitted with airbags.

 

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