‘‘Don’t be fooled by Lord Snooty’s cuddly TV act – Rees-Mogg is a Tory con artist’

We’ve always had a soft spot for eccentric types in this country. Act like you march to the beat of your own weird drum and you can get away with almost anything.

Take Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has nurtured the monocled, top-hatted toff caricature to such perfection that even some hardened anti-elitists look on him with affection.

Which is why the Discovery Channel has thrown a small fortune at him to open the doors of his Grade II-listed Somerset mansion and parade his family in a reality TV show. And despite him and his wife being worth more than £100million and his six children needing further paternal humiliation as badly as Gregg Wallace ’s offspring, he went for it. If you haven’t seen Meet The Rees-Moggs, let me fill you in. It’s a very boring cross between The Addams Family and Lord Snooty and His Pals. The schoolchildren are made to dress in black tie every Saturday night for a formal dinner, heralded by Jacob banging a hall gong.

The staff pander to their every whim including starching and ironing their master’s boxer shorts, plumping his pillow and erasing the words Posh T*** from a Rees-Mogg campaign poster.

Few emotions are shown, except whenever Jacob sets eyes on the woman who has nannied him all of his life, whereupon he is smitten.

All in all, it is a cynical attempt by Rees-Mogg to position himself for a mainstream TV career as a cuddly National Treasure now that his Somerset constituents have given him the boot.

But below the polished surface lurk signs of the man summed up by former Tory MP, Matthew Parris, thus: “His manners are perfumed, but his opinions are poison.”

The ex-minister who accused the Grenfell Tower victims of lacking “common sense” says he has no regrets over holding out for an economically disastrous Brexit, laments the failure of the abysmal Rwanda plan that cost taxpayers £715m, and opposes abortions even in cases of rape or incest.

So, not so much a patrician gentleman as a Victorian slum landlord who would send a family to the workhouse for falling a ha’penny behind in rent. Worst of all, the man who wrote a banal book about the Victorians which historian A.N. Wilson called “anathema to anyone with an ounce of common sense”, comes across as a bit dim.

Despite the overuse of Latin cliches, he has little knowledge of the modern world and can’t read the basics on a French menu.

What this TV show illustrates is how it is possible for a bluffer of mediocre talent and IQ to rise to the top of the British government if they possess the right birth certificate, connections and pronunciation.

Rees-Mogg is living proof of how Britain was conned for the past 14 years by snake oil salesmen who hid behind Etonian accents and Oxford degrees to satisfy their prejudices and boost their bank balances.

Scammers like Lord Snooty and his pal Boris, who vowed to Take Back Control but whose incompetence led to net migration into the UK soaring last year to a record 906,000.

And as most Brits struggle to pick up the tab they left behind, these upper-class grifters are showered in wealth and opportunity. Still find them harmless and cuddly?