Rees-Mogg seems like a reactionary, but he’s more dangerous than that

A practised performer, our Jacob knew exactly how to grab a few silly-season headlines by suggesting Scotland could not have indyref2 for another 20 years. Cue a Twitter storm. But Moggy had achieved his goal of touching base with the Tory faithful north of the Border, which is more than Boris has proved capable of doing.

Moggy also made sure we all knew he had previously fought a Westminster seat in Scotland – Central Fife to be precise, coming third in 1997 behind Labour’s Henry McLeish and the SNP’s Trisha Marwick. That outing did not cover Rees-Mogg in glory – he garnered a miserly 3669 votes. Famously Moggy hit the local Fife headlines when he was accused of touring the constituency in a Bentley, accompanied by his nanny. Nonsense replied Moggy, it was only a Mercedes.

Rees-Mogg is the caricature of a tweedy English toff, then? Certainly, you’d be forgiven for getting that impression. But that is exactly what he wants you to think. Instead, Jacob William Rees-Mogg is a manufactured political personality. Moggy is wholly artificial – a con as well as a Con. Behind the impeccable Edwardian charm and the weird, double-breasted suits lies a steely intellect and a vaulting ambition. With his smooth English vowels, Rees-Mogg might purr like a cat but beware the sharp political claws. Boris may be fun and Nigel Farage a matey bloke, but Rees-Mogg has a vision of a reborn, freebooting English nationalism we need to take seriously.

Matey bloke Nigel Farage. Photograph: PA

He manufactured his current, larger-than-life persona for two reasons. First, to hide his very middle-class, bourgeois origins and desperate need to make money – something he is very successful at, by the way. Moggy calculates that you cannot lead an English nationalist revolution without pretending to a faux aristocratic heritage, the better to fool the Northern proles and the rabid petty bourgeoisie of the Home Counties. If you aren’t born a Churchill then pretend to be one.

Secondly, Mogg’s fake poshness – to the point of eccentricity – has proved a quick way of getting noticed inside Westminster. Moggy never fancied the laborious career path of over-worked junior minister taking orders from civil service Sir Humphreys and Cabinet bores. Instead, he has plotted a power base among the growing ranks of frustrated, backbench Tory Brexiteers.

Rees-Mogg’s family origins are a clue to his make-up. He comes from a long line of Somerset minor gentry and clergy – the yeoman backbone of old England who created the first agricultural capitalist class, overthrew the absolutist Stuart monarchy, and set up a bourgeois parliament to protect their property.

The ascent of the Rees-Moggs began with Jacob’s father William, an RAF sergeant during his National Service before going to Oxford on a scholarship. At Oxford, William senior was routinely humiliated for his provincial stuffiness and Catholic sobriety. He inherited his Catholic faith from an Irish American mother, ironic given son Jacob’s pronouncements on the Northern Ireland border.

William desperately wanted to enter politics but after losing a series of by-elections he switched to journalism and was editor of The Times for 14 years before Rupert Murdoch arrived. On the proceeds he bought a country estate in Somerset.

Jacob reveres his dad. I once asked him where he got those wonderfully old-fashioned, double-breasted suits. Jacob happy admitted they had been made for his father. Rees-Mogg junior is a classic case of the son desperate to emulate a famous father. It explains his icy determination and boundless ambition. Yet there are interesting differences between father and son. William was sometimes quite liberal in his politics, famously penning a Times editorial criticising the jailing of Mick Jagger for a drugs offence.

Latterly, William also developed an American-style “small state” libertarianism at odds with traditional, paternalist Conservatism. Some of that libertarianism has rubbed off Jacob. But William’s political judgment was frequently wayward – Private Eye nicknamed him Mystic Mogg. Jacob, on the other hand, is cautious and calculating.

That calculating side can be seen in his approach to money. The family has no inherited wealth, yet politics is an expensive business. So Jacob became an investment banker and self-made millionaire. He is a founder and chairman of Somerset Capital Management, a fund that currently has circa £6.5 billion under management, with offices in London and Singapore. SCM specialises in emerging markets in Asia, Africa and South America, investing on behalf of wealthy private clients and City institutions. As a result, Moggy is one of the highest remunerated elected politicians in the UK. Which explains how, earlier this year, he was able to buy a £5.6 million, five-story house only 390 yards from the Houses of Parliament. Very handy for a prospective Tory leader.

There are serious questions to be asked about his financial interests. His successful management of SCM proves he is no windbag but a very sharp financial brain – as I can testify from my time working with him on the Treasury Select Committee. But even his own Tory colleagues worry about potential conflicts of interest between his business and political careers. This may explain why they pointedly rejected his bid to become chair of that powerful committee, which has oversight of the UK’s financial system and regulators.

Rees-Mogg has happily denounced Vladimir Putin. Photograph: AP

Recently, SCM was exposed as investing heavily in Russian firms blacklisted by the Americans and controlled by oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin. Rees-Mogg defends these questionable investments by arguing SCM is not allowed to make political value-judgments. Yet he pocketed the profits while publicly denouncing Putin and the Russian state for murdering UK citizens with Novichok. Moggy’s blatant hypocrisy was also on show when SCM set up a new fund based in Dublin, as an insurance should a hard Brexit – which Moggy advocates – interfere with the firm’s ability to invest in the EU.

Former Tory MP Matthew Parris brands Rees-Mogg “an unfailing, unbending, unrelenting reactionary”. I think that assessment is dangerously misleading. Reactionaries defend the status quo. Rees-Mogg is more of a revolutionary. Certainly, his imagined post-Brexit England is a reactionary dream. But to get there he is bent on creating civil war in the Tory Party and expunging its centre – while happily recruiting Ukippers into the fold to create a new, populist and right-wing bloc. Boris is about Boris, but Moggy is about creating a political movement of the right.

Can he succeed? I suspect Rees-Mogg’s invented persona will not play that well outside of Somerset or the elderly English demographic that still hankers after Churchill. His financial wheeling and dealings remain a ticking time-bomb his enemies will surely use against him. A new Centre Party might reduce the Moggy-Ukip Tories to rump. On the other hand, the ambitious chameleon that is Jacob Rees-Mogg might be prepared to do whatever it takes to lead his populist movement to Brexit glory. Let’s hope the Scots have had the good sense to decamp before that ever happens. And God help England if it does.