TORY TOFF - JACOB REES-MOGG
Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, is the kind of person you either like or loathe. I was much more of a fan of his father, William Rees-Mogg, who died in 2012 aged 84. A liberal conservative and former editor of the Times, he criticised the jailing of Mick Jagger for minor drug offences in 1967, in an editorial entitled, "Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?"
An article that I recently read in the New Yorker by the journalist Sam Knight, had this to say of his son, Jacob Rees-Mogg:
"Even to a British person, Rees-Mogg is a figure out of time. His voice, a plangent, plummy thing, is like an artificial-intelligence simulacrum of how the upper classes spoke in Edwardian England."
Undoubtedly, Rees-Mogg is an anachronism even in today's Conservative Party. Dubbed the Honourable Member for the 18th century, the footage of Rees-Mogg reclining like a patrician, on the green benches in the House of Commons, as if he were at a Roman bath, went viral. This devout Roman Catholic and quintessentially English eccentric, opposes both abortion and same sex marriage. In 2012, he suggested that the county of Somerset should have its own time zone. While it is said that Jeremy Corbyn rebelled some 428 times against his own party's leadership in parliamentary votes, during the last Labour government, Rees-Mogg, before joining Boris Johnson's administration and becoming Leader of the House of Commons, had voted against the governments of Theresa May and David Cameron a hundred and twenty-seven times.
Jacob Rees-Mogg has recently come under attack for what some people have said are crass and insensitive remarks that he made about the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017, in which 72 people died. In a phone-in interview with LBC radio presenter Nick Ferrari on Monday, Rees-Mogg claimed that the Grenfell Tower fire victims did not use 'common sense' and leave the building in spite of the London Fire brigade's instructions to stay put. In a later statement issued to the Evening Standard, he apologised for his remarks and said:
"I profoundly apologise. What I meant to say is that I would also have listened to the fire brigade's advice to stay and wait at the time. However, with what we know now and with hindsight I wouldn't and I don't think anyone else would. What's so sad is that the advice given overrides common sense because everybody would want to leave a burning building..."
Like his boss, the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, another pedigree chum from Eton, who talks of "pickaninnies with water melon smiles - a racial insult to black people - Rees-Mogg is also rather loose with the lip and has a habit of putting his foot in his mouth. After his remarks on the Grenfell fire there were calls for Rees-Mogg to fall on his sword and resign.
Yet, compared with the utterly outrageous comments made by Doreen (Baroness) Lawrence, about the same Grenfell tragedy, remarks made by the Leader of the House of Commons, seem to be more like a faux pas, a careless or stupid blunder, for which he later apologised.
Last month, Baroness Lawrence in an interview with Channel 4 News, claimed that the firefighters tackling the Grenfell Tower blaze were racist and that she had "no doubt" that the response to the inferno that killed 72 people was motivated by racism. She told channel 4 News:
BARONESS LAWRENCE
"Had that block been full of white people, they'd have done everything to get them out as fast as possible and make sure that they did what they needed to do."
The Grenfell Tower fire may have disproportionately affected minority ethnic communities, but 18 children died in that fire along with seven white Britons. And to suggests without a shred of evidence that the firefighters who risked their own lives in fighting that fire on the night, were more concerned with racial profiling than in seeking to rescue people and save lives, seems to be the most arrant nonsense. The Baroness, whose 18-year-old son Stephen Lawrence, was stabbed to death by a gang of racist thugs in south east London in 1993, was criticised for her 'poisonous', 'disgusting' and 'appalling' comments. Her claims were strongly refuted by the London Fire Brigade (LFB), and were described as "misjudged and insulting."
Matt Wrack, the general secretary of the FBU, said:
"The Fire Brigades Union has a long history of standing against racism. We do not accept that the actions of individual firefighters that night were motivated by race or any other discriminating factor."
Doreen Lawrence was made a Labour Life Peer in 2013. Unlike the Tory toff Rees-Mogg, I'm not aware that there have been any calls for Doreen Lawrence to resign, but at the very least, I think she owes the London Fire Brigade an apology.
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