Jacob Rees-Mogg – By the Nanny Who Knows Him

Jacob Rees-Mogg is without doubt the hippest man on the planet right now. Not only has he recently changed his name to Bae-Club Rees-Vlog, but next week he’s at the MOBOs performing his brand new hip-hop single ‘F*** YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!’ (his song about the London Fire Brigade) I can just see him on stage now, twirling his sceptre, cocking his top-hat and drawling something devastatingly polite into the microphone: ‘You know, one is rather fond of severely inconveniencing them bitches, if you’ll permit me a momentary lapse in grammar, all you people out there who fiercely indulge in intercourse with the women who gave birth to you.’

But it wasn’t always thus. Believe it or not, Jacob used to be considered a little starchy.

I know, right?

And I know better than most. I was his nanny. I adored that be-spectacled little ubermensch so much that I decided to stay on in his service even from beyond the grave. I’m his ghost nanny, you see. The perfect nanny for the Rees-Mogg family, as it turns out, because they don’t have to pay me anything (Nanny McNo-Phee).

Jacob’s great-grandfather, Hogg-Lees Rees-Mogg

They’re a lovely bunch, the Moggies, despite the fact that it was Jacob’s great-grandfather who killed me. He’d been drinking French furniture polish and sniffing gunpowder all day, and said he could smell ‘the whiff of the pickaninny about me’ before beating me to death with a copper serving spoon. It was a rare lapse in etiquette for a man who usually comported himself with impeccable manners: he of all people should have known that it’s a grapefruit spoon for murdering servants.

Still, my brutal murder was at least in-keeping with Rees-Mogg family tradition. Jacob’s great-great grandfather blew my mother’s face off with a blunderbuss because she ‘looked at him a bit Chinese’ as she was making him a swan  sandwich. What a character! I just feel disgusted that I never had any kids of my own so that Jacob could one day employ them in some menial position before smashing them to death with a signed copy of the King James Bible.

I’ll never forget when little Jakey was born. His mum and dad were so over-joyed they could barely contain their lips from breaking into a tight, perfectly straight hyphen. Little Jakey slipped out of his mother’s clam-pit without any fuss at all, as nonchalant as a complete bastard of a politician lounging insouciantly on the front benches of the houses of parliament during a crucial debate. I’ve never seen a child look so absolutely, completely, utterly and adorably full of withering indignation and arrogant rage. A wee smasher! The man who would one day write the political best-seller “It’s HIS-Tory, not THEY/THEM-Socialists” was already there in that tiny, pale, baleful little creature.

Not fifteen seconds later, he spoke his first words; an Oscar Wilde quote: ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.’ Not moments later, his grand-father beat him half to death with a hickory stick for not having said it in ancient Hebrew.

Jakey was a delight growing up, he really was. It took him a long, long time to wean himself off breast-milk. Even now he still enjoys the odd suckle on my ghostly titties. And sometimes I like to soothe him by turning invisible and gobbling him off in the cabinet room. But that’s just what a good nanny does, by golly.

When Jakey was about six he used to burn ants with a magnifying glass, except instead of ants it was working class people, and instead of a magnifying glass it was a shotgun. Sometimes he’d give them a sporting chance and chase them across his private minefield, promising to let them live if they could guide themselves safely to the other side with the instructions he’d painted on the ground in Aramaic.

He was nice like that, you see. Always trying to better people. He couldn’t help himself. That’s why he became a conservative, of course. So that he could help people more fortunate than himself, so one day they’d help him become as fortunate as them. And then he could just help himself to, you know, whatever the fuck he liked.

I remember his first proper big boy’s bed was made from the pelts of endangered monkeys. Well, not strictly accurate. It was the entire monkeys it was made of, all of them still alive, bound together like a raft. He took great care to angle the monkey anuses away from his face, but if a monkey did happen to shit on him as he slept, he’d just wake up and throw it to the crocodiles. Sometimes the monkeys would get lucky, and the crocodiles wouldn’t eat them, because they were already full from eating too many Malaysian servants that day. Well, I say ‘get lucky’. If a monkey survived the croc pond little Jakey would chase it round the garden and smash its brains in with an ivory cane, before masturbating over its tiny little corpse. Even to this day I can’t take him to the zoo without drugging him first.

Most of the time, though, Jakey would put his erections to good use. Once a week he would get a servant to jerk him off with an antique oven-cosy into a tiny crepe pan, which he’d then order his pastry chef to make into a man-muck omelette for his ground-maintenance staff, reasoning that a little of his DNA in their nutritious snack might make them a bit smarter by-proxy, the self-abusing, crotch-sniffing bumpkins that they were.

I remember as he got older and became a more proficient wanker he started shouting out in Latin at the point of climax. Once he accidentally gibbered out an ancient gypsy curse which he unknowingly placed upon his pet horse, Titus Andronicus. It was a literal gypsy curse in that it turned his horse into an actual gypsy. It still looked like a horse, but you could just tell. Poor Jakey was distraught at having to put it down. Even still he was smart enough to use a harpoon gun so there wasn’t any risk of being contaminated by its filthy gypsy blood.

Well, Jacob is all grown up now, but if you go into his old room it’s exactly as he left it from his wild teenage years: posters of Jesus on the wall; the Turkish hookah filled with orphan’s tears; his extensive book collection, including Enoch Powell’s best-seller ‘Europe Can Suck My Bendy Banana’; his blow-up Maggie Thatcher doll, with stolen-milk stains around the anus; his flared knickerbockers; and his seed-encrusted copies of ‘Murdered Monkey Monthly’.

And, do you know, he’s never stopped making me proud. Just this week he said something that made me tingle with joy. ‘Nanny,’ he said, ‘If you weren’t already dead, I’d jolly well kill you with my priceless antique letter-opener that once belonged to Adolph Hitler.’

The big-hearted, sentimental fool that he is!

Derek Acorah is a Mentalist Pt 1

The following is a TV review/rant I cobbled together after watching one of medium-extraordinaire Derek Acorah’s shows a few years back. More deliciously fun Acorah poo-pooing to follow over the next week or so – Jamie 

Snakes on an Astral Plane

Derek Acorah and his invisible psychic side-kick, Sam, in happier times.

Most parents keep their children away from gory, overtly disturbing, sexual or horrific TV content: explicit war films; late-night pieces of a pornographic nature; violent gun-and-monster flicks, and anything that has a hint of the red stuff or even a soupcon of rough language. All well and good.

But there are some programmes that slip under the radar, which many families actively encourage their children to watch. Happy, feel-good shows that seem innocent upon brief inspection, but if explored in any depth turn out to be more insidiously destructive and psychologically scarring than a back-to-back late-night marathon of Vampire Gore Splat Anal Destruction Nympho Whores in Trench Warfare Hell.

Welcome to Derek Acorah (broadcast on Sky 3 in the UK), a regular hour-long delve into the spirit world with the eponymous Derek Acorah, ‘Britain’s best-known medium’ – an accolade bestowed upon him by the Daily Mail. ‘Best known’? Yes, he’s ‘Britain’s best-known medium’ in the same way that AIDS is the world’s ‘best known’ sexual infection, and Adolph Hitler is Austria’s ‘best known’ Jew-killer.

'Your gullibility is THIS big, screaming woman.'

So what’s my beef with Acorah and his ilk? Surely it’s all a bit of harmless fun? Doesn’t Derek Acorah bring people comfort and closure, say ‘please’ alot, and thread love, peace and happiness into and around all of his dalliances with the spirits and their living loved ones? Well, yes. But this is why he’s so insidious. What gives a man like Derek Acorah, with no demonstrable psychic powers – certainly none that would stand up to any scientific scrutiny – the right to take people’s raw feelings of loss, hurt, fear and confusion, and attempt to exorcise them with flimflam and lies? Not to mention to extort these peoples’ feelings for money?

There are a few possible explanations for his conduct. The first is that Derek knows he has no psychic powers, and is cynically employing his theatrical tricks to make money from vulnerable punters, or else to satisfy some insecurity or Messianic complex whereby he feels a surge of self-worth or grandeur through ‘curing’ people – even if it is by a sugared deception. The second is that Derek actually believes he possesses both ESP and the ability to commune with the dead, in which case he requires some urgent and far-reaching mental help.

What's it watching? The Hissssss-tory Channel, of course! Belter!

In the episode of Derek Acorah broadcast yesterday (Friday 21st August) Derek brought out a woman and her pet snake. He attempted to read the reptile’s ‘thoughts’ and translate them for its owner.

‘He’s not been himself,’ said the woman. Excuse me? How can you tell that a snake hasn’t been himself? A drop in witty repartee? Not dressing as smartly?

Anyway, Derek was able to meld with the snake and went on to dispense some real psychically-gleaned pearls of wisdom. ‘You’ll need to take him to a vet,’ he told the woman.

Later, Derek added that his long-time spirit guide Sam was sure that the snake wanted to watch more television. The woman looked enthralled. During her own straight-to-camera moment, away from the studio audience, she made excuses for Derek. ‘It can’t have been easy reading a snake. I think he tried his best.’

Derek did little better when he moved on to bipedal mammals; although the audience didn’t share my assessment. He appeared again to have convinced them that he was a spiritual savant and all-round psychic miracle worker. This despite the fact that any person with a little common sense and a lot of balls (or a psychological condition) could come up with an achingly similar ‘reading’ and enjoy a chorus of oo’s and aah’s from any number of poor misguided souls. I’m being diplomatic here.

Derek after being told how much he gets paid for this shit.

His subject was a woman called Sharon, aged between 50 and 65. He amazed by asking if she knew anyone called Jack, Betty or Anne. She did. Incredible. Who would have thought that a woman born between 1945 and 1960 would know people with some of the most common names of that era? He moved on to wow her with such startling and specific questions as ‘Do you know someone who died of breast cancer?’ and ‘You’ve had to counsel someone recently who’s been through a break-up, haven’t you?’ Shockingly, she had. Who would have thought, given how long she’d lived, that there would be a statistical chance of those two things having happened? Certainly not Sharon or the tearful studio audience.

‘You’ve not had an easy life, have you?’ oozed Derek, staring at her like some demented hypnotist.

‘No,’ she agreed. I was almost out of my seat by then. This was getting spooky.

‘But you’re a star,’ he told her, almost on the verge of sobbing himself, ‘I know you’re a star. And they (the gaggle of dead communicating with him) know you’re a star.’

Who knows what frisson of sexual excitement was zapping through his balls at that moment as he held this deluded woman’s happiness in his huckster’s hands. He was probably thinking: ‘Ha! Jesus can suck on my big Liverpudlian throbber.’

Don't let your children watch Derek Acorah.

Have you ever heard noises in your house late at night? Probably just the pipes, or the radiators, or wood or cement expanding or contracting, right? WRONG, DICKHEAD! It’s ghosts. They’re there to talk to you, silly. Only they’re not going to make it easy for you. If your death has been foreseen by your loved ones on the other side, what are they going to do? Simply tell someone like Derek Acorah in plain, uncluttered English so that you can do something to prevent it? Rap out a warning in Morse Code? Use telekinesis on the fridge magnets to spell out ‘GO TO HOSPITAL’? No. They’d really rather prefer to make pots fall on the floor until you get the message.

Sharon had heard things in her house at night.

‘You’re confident you’re psychic, aren’t you?’

‘Well, yes, I’ve heard things. But I’m not scared.’

‘You’ve got an innate receptiveness,’ he told her. ‘You’re sensitive to spirits.’

What I like most about Derek Acorah is how he listens to all the facts, forms a hypothesis, looks at it from all angles, contemplates everything deeply, conducts a thorough investigation, follows through with an experiment, and then arrives at a wholly logical and scientific result. Inspiring.

The best part of the show, however, was when he grilled an old lady (not literally, although that really would’ve been entertaining) and claimed to have one of her acquaintances from the other side jabbering in his ear. The old lady had no idea who the person was.

‘Not someone in your family?’

‘No.’

‘Someone you know?’

‘No.’

‘If anyone in the audience wants to jump in, if you know them, please raise your hand.’

"You know someone called Morag, don't you?"

Even that little bit of fishing never made the audience in the least suspicious. Even when he moved on and left the old lady on spiritual call-waiting to entertain another spook they were still on his side and in full support of his miraculous powers. And still no one raised an eyebrow when he pretended to be in conversation with the spirit and said: ‘What’s that? You’re saying someone here does know who you are? OK, but we’re going to have to move on now, please. Step to one side, please. Thank you.’ Yeah, fuck off, ghost, nobody likes you!

It’s quite telling that after the end credits roll a message flashes up that reads: ‘All views and messages relayed in the show are for entertainment purposes only.’

Wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect someone who sincerely believed himself to possess genuine supernatural powers to fight the government and the media regulators tooth and claw to remove such a disclaimer from the end of his television broadcasts?

Just a thought. I’d like to lobby to have the message displayed throughout the entire show, in huge block capitals at the top of the screen. And force Derek to shout it at the end of each reading.

If you’re looking for something mildly diverting and inspiring for your children to watch on television as you organise lunch or dinner, don’t be tempted to expose them to Derek Acorah.

In the true spirit of the medium, simply go over to the other side. Or put on a DVD double-bill of the Hostel films which they can watch while you beat them with a fucking spade.