Private Eye's Literary Review: "A 17-year-old writing in his public school's magazine 50 years ago"

As I usually point out before criticising Private Eye, to establish my credentials, I have bought every issue of the magazine since I went to university in York in October 1978. (Before that I couldn't, because no one stocked it in Market Harborough.)

The Eye's strength at the moment is its investigations. The humour, by contrast, increasingly feels like the product of a sausage machine: feed in the week's events, turn the handle and out it comes. And as for the columnists and regular features, they are often a source of weakness.

I've had a go at The Agri Brigade and Pseuds Corner in the past - the former, I will admit, has recently been very good on the NFU's (and the Lib Dems') campaign against restoring inheritance tax to any holding of farmland, no matter how large.

So let's turn to the Eye's Literary Review, which a couple of issues ago was on to something when, in the course of a review of Ali Smith's Gliff, it complained about the stereotyped and simplistic view of politics held by many literary types.

I love the coverage of culture in the London Review of Books, but I've not forgotten the regular contributor who complained in 2011 that George Osborne was trying to pay off the national debt in one parliament.

Literary Review complains of Sally Rooney and of a caricature Conservative minister in Alan Hollingshurst's Our Evenings. 

I've not read that book, but it's worth pointing out that Tory politicians have discovered the power of intentionally becoming a caricature of yourself. Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are the obvious examples to cite, but the first Tory to employ the tactic was Ann Widdecombe.

My reason for writing this post is the sheer awfulness of the column's conclusion:

In fact, the orthodoxies of the modern leftie novel are becoming just the slightest bit tedious, and this reviewer put down Glyff with the thought that, really, voting Conservative may have something to be said for it.

If the author was aiming to hit the tone of a 17-year-old writing in his public school's magazine 50 years ago, then he scored a bull's eye. But why would you want to sound like that? And why should we value the opinions on literature of someone who does?

Jacob Rees-Mogg was hidden from voters during the 2019 general election campaign

The prime minister's critics in the Conservative Party, reports the Telegraph, know what he needs to do:

Tory critics are urging Rishi Sunak to promote Right-wingers to an “election war Cabinet” after the local elections, which are predicted to deliver sizeable Tory defeats.

Two Tory MPs have endorsed the idea to The Telegraph, with Priti Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Robert Jenrick put forward as possible names to be in contention.

One name jumps out here: that of Jacob Rees-Mogg. That's because he had to be hidden from the public during the last general election campaign.

On 11 December 2019, the eve of polling day, a Guardian article looked at the politicians who had been prominent during the campaign and those who had been absent from the fray.

This is what it said about Rees-Mogg:

From being a near-perennial fixture of political coverage in 2019, Rees-Mogg vanished from the airwaves following uproar over his comments about the Grenfell tragedy.

His presence among the top 20 most prominent campaigners in the press and TV in the campaign’s first week was largely a result of coverage of the Grenfell issue – and by the second week he had disappeared.

Instead, a series of pictures on the politician’s Twitter account suggests that he has been instructed to largely restrict himself to his safe seat of North East Somerset.

And it wasn't just the Guardian that notices. When Rees-Mogg took his mini-me son with him to the polling station the next day, the Express reported:

Mr Rees-Mogg has rarely been seen during the last few weeks of campaigning.

This may have been due to controversial comments about the people who died in the Grenfell Tower tragedy. 

The Tory MP told LBC host Nick Ferrari that the victims would have survived if they’d have just ignored what they were told by London Fire Brigade. 

He added that he would have left the building as “it just seems the common sense thing to do”.

Mr Rees-Mogg then did not attend the Tory manifesto launch at the Telford International Centre, despite other Cabinet ministers attending. 

If bringing back Rees-Mogg is the best card the Tories can play now, they're in even more trouble than we thought.

PC Bodger's finest hour: The opening of Chew Valley Lake

Writing about my mother's stories of the Somerset Constabulary in the 1950s, and of one PC Bodger in particular, the other day, I said:

And there was his finest hour: the opening of the Chew Valley Reservoir. 

The stories of his controlling the crowds with a megaphone - "Make way for Her Majesty the Queen" and "You boys! Stop playing with your balls there in the street" - went round the force.

And here, wonderfully, is a film incorporating extensive colour footage of that day, 17 April 1956. Click on the still above to go to YouTube and play the whole thing.

There are plenty of policemen in the background, though I can't claim to have spotted Bodger and his megaphone.

You can see Jacob Rees-Mogg's granny being presented to the Queen, however.

It seems the reservoir was called Chew Valley Lake right from the start, so that's what I have called it here.

Electoral Commission: Hundreds of thousands face exclusion over voter ID laws

It may have lost our data, but the Electoral Commission has found some balls.

Here's the Guardian on the commission's new Report on the May 2023 local elections in England:

Hundreds of thousands of people could be excluded from voting in a UK general election because of voter ID laws, the government’s election watchdog has said.

The laws could have a disproportionate effect on poorer people, those with disabilities and people from minority ethnic backgrounds, the Electoral Commission warned.

It said ministers should take urgent action to alleviate these impacts, including drawing up a wider list of documents that people can show to vote and allowing people without ID to have someone else vouch for their identity.

Ministers won't, of course, because the whole point of bringing in these laws was to suppress the anti-Conservative vote. Even Lord Snooty Jacob Rees-Mogg has admitted as much.

My first column for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy

I am told this column appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of the JCPCP, possibly under the title Sighcology.

Henry VI founded Eton to provide free education to 70 poor boys. If you want to read how it and the other public schools wriggled out of their charitable obligations in the nineteenth century, read Posh Boys by Robert Verkaik. If you want to know what being sent away to boarding school at a tender age does to Britain’s ruling class, read Sad Little Men by Richard Beard.

As Beard told an interviewer when the book came out: "At private school you are taught not to snitch, and my book is 250 pages of snitching."

These schools tailored there regimes so they produced self-reliant men to run the British Empire in distant outposts, but they went on turning out such types long after the Empire had gone. And Beard’s argument is that a child of eight who is sent away from home into such an atmosphere has to develop a false personality to survive.

So when he opens the diary he kept at prep school he finds: "Instead of insights into my thirteen-year-old self, the diary reads like another layer of hiding, a place where I can practise lying about my feelings."

Beard finds that he used "the elaborate vocabulary rote learned in English lessons" and made sure to "show off my rhetorical devices, especially alliteration". When you add in the Latin tags and his inability to fulfil his ambition of avoiding "verbal atrocities and general waffleness," his judgement on his young self sounds fair: "Aged thirteen, my diary reads as [Boris] Johnson speaks now, in his mid-fifties."

But then there’s an element of overcompensation about the shtick of our most prominent Old Etonian politicians. Boris Johnson was first schooled with the children of Eurocrats in Brussels and then at the same North London primary school the Miliband brothers attended. He was not packed off to boarding school until he was eleven.

You suspect - or at least, as a fully qualified armchair psychologist, I suspect - that that his career since has been an attempt to live this down, to prove that he belongs in the circles he came to move in. I’ve even seen it suggested that he was originally teased for his unusual middle name, only to turn ‘Boris’ into a new persona who was everything he wanted to be.

Similarly, Jacob Rees-Mogg is said to have been a figure of fun at Eton and Oxford. The first time the broadcaster Matthew Sweet heard him speaking at the Oxford Union, he genuinely thought it was someone doing a comic turn to send up the politicos.

So when you saw him sprawled on the government front bench, Rees-Mogg was not reliving past glories but compensating himself for all that he had missed. Ideally, he would have been able to summon a fag to make toast and then find a pretext for beating him, but sprawling would have to do. 

Incidentally, Beard gives us a delightful trivial fact. It’s not surprising that he cites the work of Erving Goffman on total institutions, but it is a surprise to learn that Goffman’s sister Frances Bay played the Fonz's grandmother in Happy Days.

******

I almost certainly have ADHD - or so an online survey told me the other day. 

The worry used to be that the concept was medicalising childhood. Children were measured against a list of behaviours (and it looked very like a list of the things children do that most irritate adults), diagnosed and medicated. Articles were written asking if Huckleberry Finn and Richmal Crompton’s William would be put on Ritalin today.

It’s worse than that now: the whole working population may soon go down with ADHD. That survey I completed was predicated on the belief that, to prove yourself free of the condition, you must behave like a model employee of a 1950s American corporation, allocating just the right amount of attention to each task and approaching all with maximum enthusiasm.

I don’t believe anyone is like that: what the ADHD doctors are offering to treat is the human condition. Or maybe it’s the vacuum where workplace activism used to be?

******

I was clearing my late mother’s house when I heard the Queen had died. I’m not a great monarchist, but it was hard to resist the feeling that there were no grownups left to tell us what to do.

In his memoir War Doctor, the surgeon David Nott, who has worked extensively in war zones and the aftermaths of natural disasters, recalls being invited meet the Queen:

I don’t know why it happened then, or why it should have been the Queen who breached the dam. Perhaps it was because she is the mother of the nation, and I had lost my own mother. My bottom lip started to go and all I wanted to do was burst into tears.

The Queen, he later told an audience at the Hay Festival, sensed his distress, touched his hand and then whispered something to a member of her staff. A moment later, six corgis ran into the room. "They ran all the way around the room and they were barking and shouting, and two or three of them went under her legs." The Queen picked up a biscuit, broke it in two and handed half to Nott. "I thought, 'Do I eat it?', and she said, 'No, no, they’re for the dog.'"

The two then spent 20 minutes petting and feeding the corgis, bonding over their love for dogs. "There," the Queen said eventually, "that’s so much better than talking, isn’t it?"

This story was widely retailed after the Queen’s death as an example of her humanity and wisdom. Some disagreed, seeing it as yet another example of the fatal British stiff upper lip - see Beard passim - and in particular of our unwillingness to talk about mental distress.

But surely there is a role for comforting too? As clients or professionals, we can’t always be engaged in heroic therapy.

The Joy of Six 1132

Robert Hutton has been to the National Conservatism Conference: "The country is in a terrible mess, and Rees-Mogg is just trying to find the guys who did this. He denounced the Budget and the failure to scrap EU regulations. He even denounced Voter ID, a policy he shepherded through Parliament, as a failed attempt to rig the vote. It wasn’t clear whether he had always been against it because of the rigging, or simply was now because it hadn’t worked."

"Between 1946 and 1950 ... around 35,000 Ukrainians came to the United Kingdom as part of the European Volunteer Workers scheme. This intended to address labour shortages by providing jobs to displaced people." Historic England provides a history of Ukranians in England.

"A great film and a rare example of one that improves on its written source, it also takes its place in the distinguished line of UK dystopias stretching from The War of the Worlds to Day of the Triffids to The Drowned World." Simon Matthews watches Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men.

Isaac Butler says it's long past time to retire the anti-historical search for who 'really' wrote Shakespeare's plays: "Trutherism abuses the liberal public sphere by using the values of liberal discourse - rational hearing of evidence, open-mindedness, fair-minded skepticism about one’s own certainties, etc. - against it. Once the opposition tires of this treatment and refuses to engage in debate any longer, the truther can then declare victory, and paint the opposition as religious fanatics who are closed-minded and scared of facing the truth."

Lisa R. Marshall takes to the wild green hills of Worcestershire with Jonathan Meades and A.E. Housman.

There's been controversy about Sussex giving the Australian captain Steve Smith a short-term contract before this summer's Ashes series. Ben Gardner asks if the decision is hurting Sussex as well as England.

St Crispin's Day and why John Arlott was the greatest commentator

Today, 25 October, is the feast day of the twin saints St Crispin and St Crispinian. Jacob Rees-Mogg couldn't resist dating his resignation letter "St Crispin's Day" - Crispin's twin never gets the same coverage.

The two were martyred in 285 or 286 in Northern France, and a local tradition holds that they lived for a time at Faversham in Kent.

St Crispin's Day (his twin doesn't get the same coverage) is famous as the date of the Battle of Agincourt and for the king's speech in Shakespeare's Henry V.

My favourite piece of cricket commentary dates from March 1977 and the Centenary Test - a one-off test played between England and Australia at Melbourne to mark the centenary of test cricket and of Ashes cricket in particular.

Arriving from a victorious tour of India, the England captain Tony Greig won the toss and put Australia in. A good team bowling performance saw them dismissed for 138. Sadly, normal service was resumed as Dennis Lillee and Max Walker bowled England out for 95.

Australia declared their second innings at 419 for 9, setting England an improbable 463 to win. Yet for a while it looked as though they might get there. Good batting by Mike Brearley, Derek Randall and Dennis Amiss meant England reached 279-2.

But it was not to be. Dennis Lillee too five wickets and Australia won by 45 runs, which had been there margin of victory a hundred years before.

While things were going well in England's second innings and Derek Randall was batting out of his skin, I heard, listening in the night, John Arlott say:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here.

He really was the greatest cricket commentator of all.

Jacob Rees-Mogg will not be in the new cabinet, but he was in the first series of 24

It sounds as though Jacob Rees-Mogg will not feature in Rishi Sunak's first cabinet, which suggests our new prime minister has better judgement than his two predecessors.

As a consolation to his admirers - I know, but say something disobliging about him on Twitter and you will meet them - here is an unexpected glimpse of him in the first series of 24.

If you can't spot him first time, have a look at the television screen at 0.15.

Jacob Rees-Mogg's schooldays

Watching Jacob Rees-Mogg lounging on the government front bench it was easy to imagine he way recreating his glory days at Eton.

But, by all accounts, it wasn't like that for him. Marina Hyde told the story back in 2018:

acob was a sort of urban myth on Eton High Street, down which he liked to proceed clicking his flapping umbrella as though it were a cane. Collectors of arcane school rules may care to know that at School, you weren’t allowed to fasten up your folded umbrella until you had attained a certain level of privilege (privilege in the earlier sense of the word, obviously, not the modern one: everyone at School obviously already had that). 

As he made his stately progress among the locals, he would frequently be followed by boggling younger boys, who already regarded his shtick as ludicrously affected. (Honestly, Moggmentum supporters – how self-loathing are you? I can’t think of anything more beaten than rallying behind someone even 13-year-old Etonians could see through in the 1980s.) 

It may be fashionable to hail Rees-Mogg’s intellect now, but back then his contributions to the debating society were ironically cheered before they got under way, and consisted of the likes of not caring too much what homosexuals do to each other as long as they didn’t do it to him. One who sat through quite a few of these zingers recalled him wearily as “a posh Karl Pilkington”.

So Rees-Mogg isn't reliving his schooldays so much as compensating himself for them.

To achieve this fully, you feel, he would like to able to summon a fag to make him toast and then find a pretext for beating him after he had eaten it. But for now lounging on the front bench will have to do.

There's an element of compensation for his schooldays about Boris Johnson's act too.

Remember he was 11 before he was packed off to board at prep school. That must have been a hell of a shock to someone previously educated at the European School in Brussels - he speaks fluent French though he pretends not to - and the same North London primary school that the Miliband brothers attended.

There's even a theory that "Boris" was originally used to tease him when classmates discovered his middle name, and that he adopted the name and a new persona to spite them.

As the poet George William Russell ("AE") put it:

In the lost boyhood of Judas Christ was betrayed.

The House of Commons is falling down

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 In fact the whole of the Palace of Westminster is. Here's Rowan Moore writing in The Observer yesterday:

In every direction stretch uncountable kilometres of wires and pipes, fronds of high-voltage cables, a Terry Gilliam cosmos of whistling and buzzing devices, vapour, puddles, stifling heat, gaffer tape, silver foil, warning signs, conduits, refrigerating units and extractor fans, long lengths of tubing that are – literally – rat runs. There are old paint tins to catch more drips, plastic bins full of used coffee cups, cardboard boxes, discarded cable trays, retired office chairs. There is a Victorian, steam-powered sewage ejector. There is asbestos.

A ring of handsome cast-iron pillars, nicknamed "the bandstand", informs me of the presence of something majestic overhead; it helps to support the lofty lanterned octagon of the central lobby of the Houses of Parliament. Around the lobby extend chambers and stairs and corridors as intricate as the mechanical basement, but more refined: fan vaults and tracery, stained glass, frescoes, encaustic tiles, linen-fold panelling, architectural devices copied from chapter houses and cathedrals, medievalising paintings of knights and maidens, scenes of battles on land and sea.

Yes, as Moore says, Britain’s democracy is being conducted above what resembles a huge and toxic bomb.

That in itself makes Westminster a great metaphor for the state of British politics. But there's more.

Our politicians there seem unable to accept there is a serious problem or to agree the spending needed to put it right and that parliament will have to meet elsewhere for some years.

Among the deniers are reported to be Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Speaker.

Meanwhile, Westminster's trade unions have complained that political parties' unwillingness to deal with allegations of sexual misconduct by MPs mean it is not a safe place to work.

Our political system is so deep in decay than it cannot exert itself to stave off disaster.

Why is Jacob Rees-Mogg so fond of imperial measures?

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Jacob Rees-Mogg's decision to launch a study of the economic benefits of reintroducing imperial units of measurement is, of course, ridiculous.

That's the whole point of it.

Rees-Mogg is a 21st-century financier who has cultivated a comically old-fashioned image as a way of disguising this fact. (It follows that those on the left who mock that image in the hope of harming his political career are actually boosting it.)

The announcement does serve political purposes too - reassuring the core Brexit vote, bringing out the worse in the government's opponents* - but it is best seen as part of Reew-Mogg's long campaign of self-advancement.

He appears to be using public money for personal PR every bit as much as Liz Truss does with all those Thatcheresque official photographs.

* On social media at least, Liberals and the left have a weakness for lecturing people. It is noticeable that Keir Starmer and Ed Davey have been careful to avoid this register.

The uselessness of Boris Johnson's cabinet is a feature not a bug

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Ed Davey says Gavin Williamson is the worst education secretary in living memory. He's right, of course.

But then Williamson is not alone in not deserving a place around the cabinet table.

Priti Patel resigned as secretary of state for international development when it emerged she had been holding meetings with Israeli officials without informing anyone in London. Yet somehow today she is home secretary.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is such a liability that he had to be hidden from voters during the last general election, but he is still leader of the House of Commons.

But maybe their presence should not be such a surprise.

Many Conservatives with principles - David Gauke, Rory Stewart, Nicholas Soames - were effectively sacked from the Commons by Boris Johnson in September 2019. 

They were not the sort of people he wanted to surround himself with. Better to have malleable mediocrities who will do whatever they are told.

Better still to have people no other Conservative prime minister would dream of appointing to the cabinet. They will know that they owe their careers to Johnson and that any successful rebellion against him would inevitably lead to the end of those careers.

It's probably all in Machiavelli: surround yourself with people who should never have been put in a position of power and you will be much more secure.

Imagine being derailed with Jacob Rees-Mogg

Photo from Network Rail

Jacob Rees-Mogg's public personality is as carefully constructed as that of any film star.

So lazy satirists who think they can hurt him by making jokes about him being old fashioned are missing the point. The overegged quaintness is a way of disguising Rees-Mogg's real nature as a thoroughly 21st-century financier.

Another important aspect of that constructed personality is its sheer disagreeability to anyone of a remotely liberal sensibility. "You may dislike me," it seems to say, "but there's nothing you can do about me."

In part Rees-Mogg is playing the public school buck he never was. Because it appears he was seen as a joke by the other boys during his Eton years.

And Matthew Sweet has said that when he heard Rees-Mogg speaking at the Oxford Union he thought he was someone doing a comic turn to send up the politicos. Well, it was an act.

Of course, you can go too far. In November 2019 he said that the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire had died because they failed to show "common sense" by following the authories' instructions to stay put and wait to be rescued.

Following an outcry, Rees-Mogg apologised and was then hidden from the voters in the general election campaign.

But that didn't prevent his being reappointed leader of the Commons after the Conservative victory, so the episode cost him nothing.

My own very limited experience of being involved in an emergency taught me that the last thing, the very last thing, you want in such circumstances is someone lounging about and telling you, in an affected upper-class drawl, to ignore the instructions you are given.

I remember, after the train had come to a halt, that we all sat there wondering what happened next. Soon flashing blue lights appeared on a distant road and we knew that someone had taken charge.

As we climbed down from the train, the police and fire brigade were exaggeratedly insistent that we took our time and took care. They did not want some falling, breaking a leg and making the incident more serious.

My conclusion is that an emergency, whether a minor derailment or a global pandemic, is not an opportunity to display your superiority or you individuality. It is a time to do as you're told.

Six of the Best 909

"Imagine the 8- and 12-year-old brother and sister who have found their place in a loving long-term foster family. Or the 16-year-old thriving in a children’s home." Yvette Stanley says it is not adoption or bust for children in care.

George Monbiot explains why burning the heather on the moors above Todmorden and Hebden Bridge have led to flooding, Led to the River Calder flooding, as it happens.

"You can’t be as neurotic as the BBC and cope with someone like me" says John Sweeney in a brilliant interview.

Nicholas Spice explains why he loathes Jacob Rees-Mogg.

"We’re listening to the lost opportunities of Ken Barlow, but what we’re watching are the lost opportunities of Roache. Like his character, Roache is trapped by the Street." Fergal Kinney on the 10,000th Coronation Street and William Roache.

"Charlotte Rampling, like her contemporaries Jane Birkin and Jacqueline Bisset, has managed to remain very British while also being undeniably European." Richard Luck profiles Rampling.

Six of the Best 899

"We need an agenda that’s more like an unconference – an opportunity for us to have open discussions, big and small, about where we are, where we want to be, and why we want to get there. Let’s have a blank slate and talk properly about what we’re doing." Nick Barlow believes the Lib Dem spring conference should not see business as usual.

Johnny Lyons argues that Isaiah Berlin's ideas have lost none of the bit of relevance.

"Prehistoric sites cannot, and should not, be viewed through a Brexit lens, whether leave or remain." Kenny Brophy does not appreciate seeing Jacob Rees-Mogg in a stone circle.

The lost rivers of London are well known, says David N. Lerner, but all cities have them. Opening them up offers a way of bringing back water and nature.

Katy Waldman of the New Yorker chooses her best books of 2019.

"The first songs most people hear as children are nursery rhymes and lullabies. The first songs Ahmet Zappa heard as a child were the shock-treatment tracks on Hot Rats." Jim Farber on the 50th anniversary of the Frank Zappa album.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The mint cake workers of Kendal

Whether this is news from the past, present or future, you have to admit the old boy made the most of his time away from the Hall.

Friday

I enjoyed Uxbridge, particularly the crowd of mothers and children I found hammering on the door of the Conservative campaign headquarters. Down in Devon I ran into the Attorney General and found his theatrical mien puzzlingly familiar. It was only this morning that I remembered where I had seen him before: he was playing the rear end of a cow in Aladdin at the Alhamba, Bideford.

Then I travelled to Witham in Essex, where the sitting Conservative offered me a lift in her sleigh and some Turkish delight. I insisted on being set down so I could catch the Green Line bus instead.

In Somerset I tipped the local urchins sixpence apiece to follow Jacob Rees-Mogg around, point at him and double up with laughter. Eventually his Nanny chased them off and I ran too – you know what Nannies are.

Passing through Leeds I bought Richard Burgon a colouring book, before spending a day with our own Tim Farron canvassing the mint cake workers of Kendal. I am pleased to report he has a considerable following amongst them.

Then it was Scotland for a night at my house Brig o'Dread, before I finished my tour delivering leaflets in Orkney for Alistair Carmichael. I was dispatched to the islands of Papa Westray and Papa Lazarou.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary:

• The Well-Behaved Orphans have been carefully measured
• Buckled inside the large wicker hamper
• From Whissendine to Essendine
• He had fashioned a rope from the bedclothes
• An amusing limerick told to me by Herbert Gladstone

The public schools' greatest weakness is now the character of their old boys

Britain’s public schools began as charities set up for the education of the poor. In the 19th century they squirmed their way out of that obligation and set about educating the children of the rich instead.

But this is not just a story of privilege, for the squirming coincided with the rise of the British Empire and the public schools took on the task of producing the caste that would run it.

That caste had to be tough, self-sufficient and independent of any ties of home. Hence the classic public school regime of cold baths, corporal punishment and compulsory team games. It produced just the type of men required, albeit at great psychological cost.

The quality this regime instilled was venerated as 'character'. It was something that the caste possessed and the rest of us did not.

This regime persisted long after the Empire had dwindled. As a young teenager in the 1970s I felt vaguely sorry for the boys of my age I saw on the station in winter, off to Saturday morning lessons in short trousers.

I can recall an old Conservative MP saying that by the time you had been through prep school, public school and been shouted at by the Regimental Sergeant Major in the Guards, you had a pretty accurate idea of your importance in the scheme of things.

That is not true of privately educated young Tories today. They think they are entitled to all the good things the world has to offer, and nothing in their education has disabused them of this idea. They have enjoyed the finest of everything and known no hardship.

Take a look at the men this system now produces.

On the surface Jacob Rees-Mogg has the charming manners the products of public schools were once noted for. But if he is crossed to the slightest degree, then the rodent teeth appear.

While Boris Johnson is a walking compendium of character failings, beginning with compulsive lying and sexual infidelity.

Which suggests that the public schools’ greatest weakness is now the character of its former pupils.

Ann Widdecombe looked old-fashioned in the 1990s but was really the future

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How we used to laugh at Ann Widdecombe when she was a government minister!

We didn't laugh at her politics, which were deeply unpleasant, but at her image. It was so hopelessly old fashioned.

As it turned out, Widdecombe was not old fashioned at all. She was an early adopter of a style that has since been deployed by a number of leading Conservatives.

The clue at the time was the number of her university contemporaries who told the press they did not recognise the young woman they knew then in the iron-clad virgin of the 1990s.

Because Widdecombe had turned herself into a cartoon character - a living exaggeration of certain characteristics that appealed to Tory voters and to Tory activists in particular.

Since then we have had Boris Johnson as a minor P.G. Wodehouse character, Jacob Rees-Mogg as Lord Snooty's grandfather and Geoffrey Cox as the famous actor you can't remember seeing in anything.

These personae are a calculated armour designed to disguise their wearers' politics and shield them from conventional criticism.

That is why people who think they are hurting Rees-Mogg by laughing at him for being behind the times are playing into his hands.

And it is why we should not have laughed at Ann Widdecombe.

Sir Nicholas Soames on Jacob Rees-Mogg

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Over on The Times website you will find this gem:

Sir Nicholas is more horrified by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Commons leader. His behaviour this week, lolling on the front bench, was "repulsive", he says. 

"He is in serious danger of believing his own shtick. He is an absolute fraud, he is a living example of what a moderately cut double-breasted suit and a decent tie can do with an ultra-posh voice and a bit of ginger stuck up his arse. You do not behave like that as leader of the House."  

Both men went to Eton but Sir Nicholas says Rees-Mogg’s behaviour has nothing to do with his school. 

"I thought it was bloody bad manners and he of all people should know better. He has had all the advantages and frankly nanny made a serious bish. I wanted to kick him firmly in the arse and say, ‘What the hell do you think you are playing at? Sit up!’ 

"His speech in the Brexit debate was “the lowest form of student union hackery, insolence and bad manners."

Six of the Best 860

Eli Zaretsky examines the mass psychology of Brexit: "The best description I know of this mentality, Fintan O’Toole’s Heroic Failure, characterises it as 'the transformation of a screw-up into a demonstration of character'. Examples include the Charge of the Light Brigade, Sir John Franklin’s doomed attempt to find the Northwest Passage in the 1840s, and Dunkirk. In each case, the British character is seen to rise above self-inflicted disaster through studied indifference, and thereby to manifest its inner superiority."

Mark Bergen on how YouTube executives ignored warnings and allowed toxic videos to run rampant.

The novels of J.G. Farrell seems suddenly topical again, argues Simon Matthews, echoing Eli Zaretsky and Fintan O'Toole.

It’s time to rescue Latin from the Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world, says Charlotte Higgins.

Adrienne Lafrance shows how the bicycle paved the way for women's rights.

"Terry Gilliam‘s third feature is a hard slap to a child’s imagination. Packed with a lot of the same mythological story beats found in George Lucas’ sci-fi fable but layered with a nasty reality that promises death as much as it does adventure." Film School Rejects watches Time Bandits again.