“There’s some bloke called Jacob on my list,” Annunziata Rees-Mogg said as she told us the line-up at the PopCon Conference. “I don’t know who he is. I think he’s my brother.”
Some of us are still shell-shocked by the election result, but has it come to this, that speeches at Popular Conservatism Conferences are to be delivered mainly by members of the Rees-Mogg family?
It is, of course, a large family, and splendidly Conservative. But is it Popular?
Annunziata pointed out one of the advantages of the Tory defeat: “We can now hold big meetings in Westminster without being serenaded by Steve Bray.”
That is indeed a wonderful thing. Bray’s braying week after week through his megaphone got on the nerves of anyone at Westminster who was not stone deaf.
Five days on from the general election a few hundred Conservatives had gathered for the PopCon Conference, including a sprinkling of MPs and ex-MPs.
Suella Braverman, still an MP, could not make it, for she had just been addressing some other conference in Washington DC. But she sent a very nice video in which with many a smile, and occasional hand gestures which revealed her to be blue down to her fingernails, she admitted that on immigration, “We did not do what we promised to do.”
Mark Littlewood, the Director of PopCon, said of the election result: “It was bad, very bad, but not quite as bad as it might have been.” The Conservatives, he pointed out, are still unambiguously the Official Opposition.
David Starkey, the celebrated historian, said he possessed the “essential qualification” for taking part in contemporary politics: “Ladies and gentlemen, my father was a toolmaker.”
He added that in his opinion, Sir Keir Starmer “is not very clever” and “very thin-skinned”.
Conservatives, he lamented, “have abandoned the public sphere to the Left”, the quangocracy, the Civil Service and the judges, who “hate the People”.
Lord Hannan agreed: “It was catastrophic to change two leaders without a general election.” The Conservatives’ task now is “to speak, as Disraeli put it, for the sublime instincts of an ancient people”.
Lord Frost, whose speech has already been published in its entirety on ConHome, lamented that “we have followed the collectivist Zeitgeist”, and remarked on “the party’s near disintegration in many constituencies”.
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, fresh from defeat in North East Somerset, admitted, “I’m not sure we’re very Popular”, or indeed “very Conservative”, and observed that “the charisma of power has been taken away from us”.
But he added that things have been bad before. After the break-up over the Corn Laws in 1846 it took the Conservatives 28 years to win a parliamentary majority.
“In 28 years I’ll be about the same age as Joe Biden,” he remarked, and will be ready to do his bit.
Meanwhile, he admitted, it will not do to fall back on the Rees-Mogg family, for “we need to reunite that broader Conservative family” which includes those who voted for Reform.
He pointed out that after Disraeli was defeated in 1880, “we set up the Primrose League”, which at its inception was derided, for it seemed to consist of inventing fancy titles and handing out medals to each other, yet within ten years it had over a million members and had become the first major political movement in which women played an equal role.
Lord Randolph Churchill founded the Primrose League. Who now can play the part of Lord Randolph?
Sir Jacob did not confide this aspect of his vision. He is known, however, to be at work on a Reality TV show.
The world, we discover, has not seen the last of the Rees-Mogg family. Here at last Conservatism may once more become truly Popular, by expressing the sublime instincts of an ancient people.