It’s not fairly the Kardashians. Or the Furys. But these Rees-Moggs are unusually addictive, writes JANE FRYER

Meet the Rees-Moggs (Discovery+)

Verdict: Posh Reality

Rating:

My very favourite scene in the first episode of Meet the Rees-Moggs is not the whole family dolled up for their weekly black-tie Saturday night dinner of mashed potato in their wood-panelled dining room.

Or the housemaids giggling in the laundry room over Jacob’s penchant for starch and a ‘bit of stiffness’ in his boxer shorts.

Or Anselm – child number four of six – putting on a brave face when he is required to spend his 12th birthday at Boris’s 60th birthday party.

No. It’s when Sean Goodwin, Jacob’s butler who does everything from making the cider to polishing the vintage Bentleys – or, as Jacob puts it breezily, ‘everything that needs to be done in a busy household’ – is doggedly removing the felt-tipped words ‘POSH T***’ from a Rees-Mogg placard, right outside Jacob’s mother’s house.

‘If it was permanent marker, I’d have got that off,’ he boasts, scrubbing away with a cloth soaked in petrol. ‘Paint? I’d had have got that off easy.’

Of course he would! Sean would do anything to support ‘the Boss man’, including appearing in the new six-part TV show for Discovery+ that lord knows why they are doing.

I interviewed Jacob and his lovely wife Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair, who is far posher than him, a couple of weeks ago. And although I asked, I still never quite got to the bottom of why on earth they decided to throw themselves, their six children – Peter, Mary, Thomas, Anselm, Alfred, Sixtus – and their extensive staff into a reality TV series made by the same production company that made At Home with The Furys, a glimpse of the life of ‘gypsy king’ boxer Tyson Fury, his wife Paris and their own brood of six.

Helena Rees-Mogg doesn’t really do television – far too busy hunting and shooting and skiing and hiking and ferrying children around. Neither she nor Jacob ever watched a minute of reality TV before filming began. And they certainly don’t need the money.

Jacob said he thought it would be fun. And interesting. And most of all he wanted to show politics behind the scenes – what happens at constituency surgeries and so on.

But of course that all went up in smoke the minute Rishi announced the early June general election and the clock was ticking. So we start on May 22, with Helena bursting into their £5million Westminster House, telling Nanny the election has been announced.

Yes, good old Nanny! Aka Veronica Crook, who has worked for the Rees-Mogg family since the Middle Ages – or at least 1959, and happily recalls the day he was born, ‘in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, like a little frog, all yellow’.

When Jacob was a boy, she once took turns – with his maid – shielding his delicate neck from the sun at Glyndebourne. And when he was grown, she went canvassing with him in Fife in 1997 in his mother’s Mercedes estate.

She’s been with the family so long that she now even has her own portrait, in her favourite fuchsia-pink jumper and pearls, next to the kitchen. She is warm and kind and doesn’t seem the sort to be flustered by anything. Certainly not yet another election. But the rest of them are ruffled.

Helena confides to the cameras, ‘the Conservatives are on course for a crashing defeat’, and breaks it gently to the younger boys that Daddy might lose his job after 14 years. ‘I’ve never even heard of anyone losing their job,’ says Anselm in surprise.

Jacob, meanwhile, decamps immediately to Gournay Court, their exquisite 17th century nine-bedroom pile in Somerset, where he starts each day with a copy of The Times and an instant coffee in bed – brought to him by Sean – before heading off on the stump in his constituency where the ‘Out Mogg’ brigade are there in full force.

And he really puts his long, slim, immaculately tailored back into it. Cheerfully waving at people yelling ‘w*****’ and telling him they want him out, knocking on endless doors and eating a lot of Greggs chocolate eclairs.

‘I love Greggs!’ he trills, as he knocks and knocks and chats and chats.

And then safely home in time for a nice English dinner and a moment to say a few prayers and admire his collection of religious relics in his very own chapel. As Jacob says himself: ‘We are a rather different kettle of fish to the Kardashians.’

Not that he’s ever seen their show, but he’s right.

And it works. Not just because of Jacob who, as Helena puts it ‘is exactly the same behind the scenes as he is in public’. But because of the rest of them as well.

Helena is funny and surprisingly straightforward for someone whose mother has five Van Dycks and two Stubbs paintings. And Sean is a wonder.

The genius, as it turns out, was getting the kids involved.

Mary is a television natural. Anselm is sporty and handsome. Alfred, eight, is roundly unimpressed by any of it. And Sixtus, six, is either honking through his trumpet practice with family portraits glaring down or having meltdowns – quite possibly at having been given such a very silly name – but also reminding us that this is a real family, however unlike our own.

And what with Jacob’s political career imploding in episode two – we see him lose his North East Somerset seat, standing on a stage next to a man wearing a balaclava printed with baked beans – we’ll get to see a lot more of them.

On holidays. On the pier in Weston-super-Mare. On a cross-Channel ferry. On Bonfire Night. And dressing up in black tie every Saturday night with Sean dolloping out the mashed potato.

So not quite the Kardashians. Or the Furys. But strangely addictive.