I don’t agree with Jacob Rees-Mogg, but how I admire this real man of principle

Sep 7, 2017 by Jill

by Sarah Vine, Mailonline:

Authenticity is a rare thing in a politician these days — or so we are constantly being told. So you might have thought that Jacob Rees-Mogg’s reckless decision to answer Piers Morgan’s questions straightforwardly and with total candour on GMTV would be met with near universal approval.

But as ever in modern Britain, honesty is only rewarded if the truth happens to match the approved dogma. In other words, you can say what you believe — so long as what you believe is politically correct.

[…] But in the current political climate, where voters and fellow politicians are heartily sick of spin and alive to every trick of the limelight, individuals such as Mogg hold a certain fascination. For he possesses something that too many politicians do not: authenticity. And as one former minister put it to me just the other day, ‘authenticity is the one political trait you cannot manufacture’.

For this reason he recently topped a poll of Conservative voters as their preferred choice to succeed Theresa May as leader. And for this reason he suddenly finds himself at the sharp end of the liberal hate-mob.

I don’t think any of this will damage his chances of promotion. Far too many politicians in recent years have been revealed as paper tigers, incapable of delivering the standards of intellect or the level of competence they promised. Someone who presents themselves for what they are, warts and all, is so much more appealing a proposition.

Rees-Mogg represents a return to core family values, a sense of order and civilisation and above all a certain moral clarity that many people feel is distinctly lacking in modern life. Against a background of uncertainty, he offers a number of fixed points, a set of clear rules by which one can live a life, a moral simplicity that a liberal mind might find stifling, but which others, craving direction, find liberating.

I don’t agree with Rees-Mogg, not on abortion, not on gay marriage. But I recognise in him a man of courage, principle and integrity — something which in this day and age is worth far more than the flaccid consensus of the commissars of political correctness.

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