I’ve put money on it: Rees-Mogg will be the Tories’ answer to Corbyn

No one would ever have dreamt that Jeremy Corbyn could become Labour leader. For his entire career he’s been a reliable Private Eye parody of an intransigent and irrelevant backbencher, a walking pastiche of what the party as a whole was once proud to stand for: Clause 4, The Red Flag sung at party conferences, nationalisation of major industries, an end to the monarchy, Britain out of the EU, solidarity with Cuba, etc. His becoming Prime Minister would be the realisation of The Tories’ very worst fears. The notion that it could actually happen was so traumatic to them that they couldn’t even begin to take it seriously until it was far too late. Hence they are, as Paul Mason argues, panicking.

Actually, I tell a lie. There’s something that scares the Tories even more, which is that Corbyn might become PM because the electorate want him to. This is truly the worst nightmare of the Tory right: the country turning left. The very thought would destroy them. This terror is starting to combine with their evident lack of preparation for Brexit negotiations to produce paralysis, and their failure to form a government evinces an inability to function in the face of imminent humiliation. Daniel Hannan-aligned oddballs on the hard right of the party are starting to suggest they simply occupy the throne and have five years of governing without legislation, essentially leaving the UK without a government just to stop Corbyn. However, they know that if the UK electorate has seen through their lack of a strategic programme beyond the profitable chaos of Brexit, if it decides it was conned and actually prefers the benefits of EU membership, then it certainly won’t vote for Michael Gove or Boris Johnson or any of the old faces. Then there’s the fact that the very best efforts of their attack dog newspapers to put Corbyn out of action by openly calling him a terrorist failed. All this adds up to outright desperation, and for all their political and cultural arrogance over the last seven years, we and they are starting to remember that between Major and Cameron they chose all of their leaders in a blind panic.

Now, this online poll is almost certainly entirely misleading, the mere result of trolling. But if enough of the Tories’ currently very frightened membership decided that the party needs, like Labour, a representative of its core values, and if Dacre and Murdoch were to meet and be charmed by him, to be persuaded that the electorate could be made to warm to his chinless, blimpish, unashamedly elitist schtik, the notion of Jacob Rees-Mogg as party leader would begin to make a lot of sense. After all, this is the age of the troll. Rees-Mogg could be the atavistic throwback, the tribute act that May can’t carry off, the Boris Johnson who’s even more of a joke and doesn’t come with that particular clown’s baggage or the snarl that his moptop doesn’t always manage to keep under wraps.

In policy terms Tories have now swallowed up Ukip (although terrifyingly for them, Farage’s working class voters went for Corbyn). Thus it may be that the pro-Brexit wing get to select the new leader. If so, there’ll be no more pretence of ‘modernisation’, no huskies and no nonsense about inclusivity, workers’ rights or the ‘greenest government ever’. There are many influential Tories whose priority is to sabotage any attempt to get out of Brexit, who will happily hurl the country, indeed the entire continent off a cliff by staging a walk-out from the talks. They might go for Rees-Mogg. Johnson doesn’t convince them or anyone else much any more. Trump would love him, and if the US could choose Trump, and Labour could choose Corbyn (their reasoning might go) then the country as a whole might go for this comedy Etonian, an affable monster who represents their core values.

Right now, with almost the entire country aghast at the ruins of their bonfire of regulations, they’re on the ropes. Nobody thinks they have the public or even national interest at heart. In this context Rees-Mogg, with his much-shared and (in the current context) staggeringly obnoxious insistence on the opportunities an even bigger bonfire presents, has stood out. He carries the flame, standing for a doubling-down on everything that currently makes the Tories unpopular: deregulation, unashamed denial of Climate Change, a pretence that the empire is still with us, undisguised hostility to the very notion of human rights. He would (God forbid) be a 1930s PM for the final stages of a slow motion repeat of that decade, redeeming his grandparents’ generation for their failure to stand up to those who insisted on standing up to Hitler, a historic betrayal which ultimately led to the horrors of the Welfare State, the end of empire and the advent of a multicultural society.

Given that the UK is very quickly turning into the sick joke of Europe, making a living embodiment of the butt of the joke national leader will make automatic sense to a party whose core values lie in contrariness and an obstinate denial of modern realities. The polls (the real ones) don’t at present take Rees-Mogg remotely seriously, but I think it would be a mistake to join and vote for him. Such a move could, as the Turdmeister Toby Young knows very well, easily backfire :-)*.

Jacob Rees-Mogg could become the British equivalent of Donald Trump.

P.s. As part of this piece I fully intended to go to a betting site and put my money where my mouth is, but fortunately/unfortunately I can’t access UK gambling sites from Italy. Oh well, I’ll just spend it on some more gelati and overpriced deck chairs instead.

*Of course if the Tories were to decide for some reason that Rees-Mogg was too serious a candidate for party leader and wanted to choose someone who’s even more of a joke, then Toby Young would be an obvious contender. Mind you, it’s also possible they could also go completely fucking insane and choose Boris “Who on earth still uses fire stations in 2015?!” Johnson.

BTW: It appears that despite the intellectual credentials of their hero, fans of Rees-Mogg can’t (or at least don’t) read:

The number of likes, that heart emoji and the fact that someone’s shared it are a bit worrying. I really hope I haven’t ‘done a John Oliver‘.