Jacob Rees-Mogg finds his Man Friday in the Times
To the Tory conference in the company of Times sketch writer Quentin Letts. He’s a-billin’ and a-cooin’ over Walter Softy-styled MP Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is catholic in his quotations. His speech on day one of this conference embraced Dryden, Disraeli, Daniel Defoe and Georgie Porgie.
One’s a rhyme about a feckless toff, the others are in turns: a poet, a politician and a writer. Daniel Defoe (writer) gave us Robinson Crusoe. But according to Letts, who given his adoration of Rees-Mogg could be cast as the MP’s Man Friday, he also wrote Gulliver’s Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts by Lemuel Gulliver.
Mr Rees-Mogg used Dryden to reflect on this violent rage among the left. “In friendship false, implacable in hate, resolved to ruin or to rule the state,” he said. Moving to Defoe, Britain was like Gulliver “tied down at Lilliput by a ragtag, motley collection of feeble, fickle, footling politicians, desperate to cancel the largest single democratic mandate in our history”.
Gulliver was written not by Defoe, but by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift. As Swift put it: “Proper words in proper places make the true definition of style.”
Image: The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver by James Gillray (1803), (satirising Napoleon Bonaparte and George III). Metropolitan Museum of Art
Posted: 2nd, October 2019 | In: News, Politicians Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
