‘Staggeringly silly’: critics tear apart Jacob Rees-Mogg’s new book

AN Wilson describes Tory MPs book about eminent Victorians as morally repellent

Adoring colleagues on the right of the Conservative party hang on Jacob Rees-Moggs every word in the House of Commons, considering him one of Brexits 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 Victorias 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-Moggs effort was anathema to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply 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 Napiers 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-Moggs 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-Moggs 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-Moggs book as a full-throated, clear-sighted, well-researched and extremely well-written exposition of the Victorians and their values.

Rees-Moggs 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 books critical savaging fails to impede Rees-Moggs further political rise, Sandbrooks 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.

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