5/20/2019 'Staggeringly silly': critics tear apart Jacob Rees-Mogg's new book | Politics | The Guardian

'Staggeringly silly': critics tear apart Jacob Rees Mogg's

new book
AN Wilson describes Tory MP’s book about eminent Victorians as ‘morally repellent’

Frances Perraudin
Sun 19 May 2019 13.57 BST

Adoring colleagues on the right of the Conservative party hang on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s every
word in the House of Commons, considering him one of Brexit’s foremost rhetoricians.

But after the release of his new book about eminent Victorians, the literary world has begged
to differ, with critics gleefully mauling it as “staggeringly silly” and “absolutely abysmal”.

The Victorians: Twelve Titans who Forged Britain, published this week to coincide with the
200th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s birth, features figures including the former prime
ministers Robert Peel, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

Rees-Mogg, the MP for North East Somerset and chair of the European Research Group (ERG),
reportedly spent about 300 hours writing the work, for which he has so far received £12,500
from Penguin Random House.

But its early readers have not been persuaded that the project was time well spent. The
historian AN Wilson, whose book The Victorians was published in 2002, wrote in the Times
that Rees-Mogg’s effort was “anathema to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply
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common, sense”. Describing the work as “a dozen clumsily written pompous schoolboy
compositions”, he said it claimed to be a work of history, but was in fact “yet another bit of
self-promotion by a highly motivated modern politician”.

On the chapter about Gen Charles Napier’s conquest of Sindh, Wilson wrote: “At this point in
the book you start to think that the author is worse than a twit. By all means let us celebrate
what was great about the Victorians, but there is something morally repellent about a book
that can gloss over massacres and pillage on the scale perpetrated by Napier.”

Writing in the Guardian, Kathryn Hughes described the book as “an origin myth for Rees-
Mogg’s particular rightwing vision of Britain”. “In parliament, Rees-Mogg is often referred to
as ‘the honourable member for the 18th century’, a nod to those funny clothes he wears, along
with pretending not to know the name of any modern pop songs,” she wrote.

“What a shame, then, that he has not absorbed any of the intellectual and creative elegance
that flourished during that period.”

She criticised the lack of women in the book. “In mythology, six of the 12 Titans, the children
of Uranus and Gaea, were female; not here,” Hughes wrote. “The only female who appears in
the book is Queen Victoria herself who, Rees-Mogg assures us, ‘became no less of a woman
when she learned to rely upon Albert as a partner and to trust him’.”

Dominic Sandbrook described the book as abysmal and soul-destroying. Writing in the
Sunday Times, he said: “No doubt every sanctimonious academic in the country has already
decided that Rees-Mogg’s book has to be dreadful, so it would have been fun to disappoint
them.

“But there is just no denying it: the book is terrible, so bad, so boring, so mind-bogglingly
banal that if it had been written by anybody else it would never have been published.”

In a rare positive response, quoted by Penguin to promote the book, the conservative
historian Andrew Roberts described Rees-Mogg’s book as “a full-throated, clear-sighted, well-
researched and extremely well-written exposition of the Victorians and their values”.

“Rees-Mogg’s choice of a dozen Victorian luminaries allows him to defend an era too often
ignored or written off in British history, and to compare it to our modern day in a way that
readers will find gripping but also chastening.”

In the Observer, Kim Wagner, a senior lecturer in British imperial history at Queen Mary
University of London, joined in the general mauling. “The book really belongs in the celebrity
autobiography section of the bookstore,” he wrote. “At best, it can be seen as a curious artefact
of the kind of sentimental jingoism and empire-nostalgia currently afflicting our country.”

If the book’s critical savaging fails to impede Rees-Mogg’s further political rise, Sandbrook’s
review does offer a silver lining to those who find him objectionable. “Before I started, the
prospect of Rees-Mogg in Downing Street struck me as a ridiculous idea,” he wrote. “But if this
is what it takes to stop him writing another book, then I think we should seriously consider
paying the price.”

Topics
Jacob Rees-Mogg
History books
Conservatives
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