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!

To the Emperor, all but the Emperor belong in the gutter

Major, Theodore; Man in Bleak Landscape; Wigan Arts and Heritage Service; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/man-in-bleak-landscape-162632

Modern life is awe-inspiring and hyper-stimulating, but deeply confusing, and to a maddening degree; made even more so by the myriad ways the rich and powerful have devised to deploy that confusion for tactical gain; lobbing fireworks and flash-bangs of panic and distraction at us to keep us moving, always moving: never stopping, never thinking. We don’t need much of a shove in the direction of distraction: our eyes are already blinded by the gadgets we clutch in our claws; our thoughts over-run by the endorphins they release into our brains, like we’re trained rats pushing buttons for treats.

We’re made to run the Orwellian gauntlet down every street, along every junction of the information superhighway, as we’re assailed on all sides by Facebook feeds filled with fakery and fury; the weaponised worthiness of a hundred-million keyboard warriors; and incendiary headlines that boom out their daily beat of hatred from beneath war-like, blood-red banners.  At any given moment we’re being accused of, or being pushed to commit, thought-crimes, hate-crimes, and crimes – to both body and soul – of every stripe imaginable.

We spend our days spitting out words as though they were bullets, rat-a-tat-tatting at people about values, identity, sovereignty, tolerance, intelligence, and truth (whatever that is). We wax lyrical about the good old days, the never-was golden ages of peace and prosperity.

Human societies have become so intricate and complex that we tend, more often than not, to ascribe commensurately complex motivations to the people who comprise them. This muddles and over-complicates the often very simple impulses behind the things that we do, or are done to us.

Take Brexit. We frame it as an ideological schism being fought at street-level among the ordinary folk, with the forces of progressive change, shared humanity and multiculturalism on one side, and the forces of culturally-conservative, insular and isolationist protectionism on the other: but what if we’re all just pawns being moved around to satisfy the unslakeable thirst of the rich and powerful for yet more money and power? Spoiler alert: we definitely are. (see the Private Eye article at the foot of this piece of writing for a flavour of the sort of behaviour that’s driving and helping to maintain the country’s current political and economic condition)

Some degree of fight is inevitable, even healthy, in a society. It’s the engine of change: the sword that breaks the chains of oppression, the fire that burns the old ways to dust. But what happens when those who rule over our lives – the oligarchs, the corporate heads, the media barons, the greedy dictators and the billionaires – turn the apparatuses of our freedoms against us? When they use smoke, lies and mirrors to set us at each other’s throats as they smile and sneer from the shadows?

We, the masses, the 99 per cent, are often to be found hacking at and goring each other in the gladiatorial arena, as the 1 per cent watch dispassionately from the high seats, occasionally deigning to flick a wrist to seal our earthly fates.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the 1 per cent have won, and have done so without ever having to fire a shot (not in this country, at least; and not recently). They convinced us that they were just like us, and we were just like them. They re-made us in their own image, minus the power. Made us ants who think we’re Gods; slaves who think we’re emperors, gazing up at the high seats of the Coliseum  and seeing our own face reflected. The belief that we have more in common with the greedy, the royal and the tyrannical than we do with our own brethren in the gutter is as ubiquitous and dangerous as it is sad and delusional.

It’s the worst kind of Stockholm Syndrome; the worst kind of twisted vanity. “They’re taking your jobs!” say the corporatocracy. “You’re paying for these people!” jeer the politicians. “They’re laughing at you!” cry the newspapers. “We, the people, shouldn’t have to accept this!” say the multi-billionaires.

So the people with their hands pressed around the throat of the body politic make a proposal. “Let’s make this country great again/take back control/drain the swamp/return to the old values/delete as applicable!”

“YES!” the people scream. “YES, YES, YES!”

And so freedoms are rolled back, liberties are re-claimed and vital provisions are shut down or torn apart: all in our name, of course.

And all the while, we, the people, scream at the poor souls on the rungs and decks below us, so loudly that we can’t hear the whips being cracked at our own backs. We cheer as the poor and disadvantaged are punished for the sin of being born unlucky, forgetting or ignoring the role of chance in our own fates.

When the policies rolled out by the hyper-rich hurt us, too – as they always do – we cry out in anger and pain: “This isn’t fair! Why would you do this to me? I’m worthy. I’m good! I supported you! You’re supposed to be punishing THEM, not me. This wasn’t the plan! You’re supposed to be punishing THEM.”

But you ARE them. The prisoners, the drug addicts, the jobless, the struggling, the single mother, the single father, the immigrant, the outcast. You’re as much them as you are the doctor, the lawyer, the electrician, the musician and the nurse. WE are in this together.

Never forget: to the emperor, all but the emperor belong in the gutter.

The way we’ve chosen to cover and govern our planet is absurd. We all crawled from the same primordial soup. For millennia after we were nothing more than scattered bands of cold and frightened proto-people, huddled together in caves and forests trying to fend off the darkness and protect ourselves from the savage indifference of Mother Earth. Always striving; barely surviving.

And then one day – we can suppose – a man looked down at his fists, or perhaps surveyed the pile of shiny stones and animal furs he’d amassed in his cave, and felt emboldened to declare to his tribe: ‘I am your King.’ And those four little words were powerful enough to bring forth a future world of crowns and slaves and jets and castles and guns and flags and great golden skyscrapers towering into the clouds as children, in countries not so very far away, choked and died in blackened, smog-filled pits.

Still, many of us think, It’s not so bad here in Scotland, or here in the UK. Sure, some people are unlucky, far unluckier than me, and life for all of us could certainly be better, but I’ve got free health-care, a relatively high life expectancy, a car, a TV, a house, and holidays. Things can only get better, right?

The dark ages may have stalled our species’ scientific and technological advancement for a millennia or so, but we’re in a post-enlightenment age now. Everything is illuminated, even the darkest corners of the farthest reaches of our galaxy. We can split atoms, land robots on asteroids and make the hearts of dead men beat in the chests of the once-dying. We’re moving forwards, right? Always forwards. Nothing can happen to drag us back, right?

It’s foolish to believe that the changes we make, and are made to us in turn, are irreversible; that progress is inevitable and unstoppable. History is cyclical, not vertical. World War I, World War II, Korea, Darfur, Vietnam, Iraq. The lessons we learn day-by-day die by the billion-load, year upon year; and like children, our species has to learn how to crawl, walk, talk and remake the world anew, every century, every generation, every blessed day. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we get it wrong, but throughout it all our development is guided, stilted, thwarted and dictated by the rich and the powerful and the decadent, a set of parents whose cruelty, corruption and indifference leaves a stain on the souls of all the children of the earth.

How can you fight a group with the power to destroy the world? How can you vanquish a group who owns the tech giants, the media companies, and the banks? How can you vote down a group with tentacles that reach into and around every government and politician?

You can’t.

The only weapon you have is time. That, and an unwavering belief in our shared humanity; the resolution to keep hoping and trying for a better world, no matter how futile or unrealistic the outcome may seem.

Maybe with enough time we can remake the world in our image; force a new cycle of history into rotation: a perfect squared-circle.

We are the tide.

Some of us roar from the sea in crashing waves, some of us rise and fall gently at the shore-line, but day after day, year after year, together… we’re the ones who wear down the mountains, and turn the rocks to sand.

 

 

EXCERPT FROM PRIVATE EYE

“There may be rules against rigging the financial markets, but not if the move is big, brazen and political enough.

Last weekend Mayfair-based hedge fund boss Crispin Odey told the Mail on Sunday he would support Boris Johnson in the event Theresa May is forced to resign. The purpose would be to see through a hard Brexit. “If we walked away from Europe, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world,” said Odey. Not for him it wouldn’t. He admits to shorting the pound and would make millions from the currency’s inevitable fall even as it wreaks havoc on the UK economy.

While backing the man who calls leaving the EU ‘liberation’, Odey isn’t averse to the EU’s fiscal and regulatory charms. Eight of the 14 funds in his Odey Asset Management stable are domiciled in, er, Dublin, while just four are UK-registered (the other two are in the Caymans). What Johnson called the ‘over-regulatory instincts that have held the EU back for so long’ in his recent Tory party conference speech don’t seem to have stood in Odey’s funds’ way. Nor does it seem that, when it comes to the most important aspect of handling Brexit – making serious money from it – the billionaire hedgie thinks too much of his great political hope’s rallying cry to ‘believe in Britain’.”