Political column - September 13

One is from a Guardian columnist. The other came from the first Official Monster Raving Loony Party councillor in Telford.

1. "A joke, an anachronism, extreme right wing, reactionary, a class warrior (for his class alone) with a track record of voting down every socially progressive policy, a Catholic believing in its anti-women fundamentalism, not a charming, upper-crust throwback, but a thoroughly modern, neoconservative bigot with views that verge on fascistic."

2. "What a wonderful and charming man he is. His smile captivates the eye. He is calm and collected, passionate and unpatronising, intelligent and interesting, handsome and hardy”

If JRM does become PM - and he says himself that if he is the answer, somebody has asked the wrong question - he will be the first PM since John Major to have significant Shropshire links.

In an effort to find evidence of upper class twittery, I have been doing some delving into the days not so long ago when he stood for The Wrekin seat.

Moggy, then aged 30 and a bachelor at the time, was chosen in 2000 by Wrekin Conservative Association to fight the constituency. He was one of three shortlisted candidates and was winner in a secret ballot in which 54 members voted.

Shropshire connections? He is descended from a former rector of Wrockwardine church, a Huguenot refugee who served there for over 30 years.

And his father, Lord William Rees-Mogg, the former Editor of The Times, lived for a time at Wrockwardine.

JRM's selection as prospective parliamentary candidate for The Wrekin caused considerable interest.

The sitting MP was Labour's Peter Bradley, who was described as a "total fruitcake" by Moggy in one of his early gambits.

Some of Moggy's quotes about himself were dug up.

He had once described himself in the Daily Telegraph's Peterborough column as "a slightly more intelligent version of Bertie Wooster”, and indeed he drove a 1968 Bentley.

Rees-Mogg, who had stood unsuccessfully in Fife Central in the 1997 general election, had also told the same column: “I’m giving up anything that involves people voting for me. I gradually realised that whatever I happened to be speaking about, the number of votes in my favour always dropped as soon as I opened my mouth.”

As he went on the campaign trail in Shropshire he said: “I know that people think that because I am an investment manager I am rather an urban candidate. But my family come from Somerset and I was brought up in a rural area. I know farmers and farming areas."

According to one contemporary article, at the end of his white-tie dinner parties he would ask the women to leave the room so the men could drink port, and he still relied upon the services of his nanny to iron his clothes and cook him hot meals.

Let us move on to some of his highlights during the 2001 general election campaign.

When Tony Blair's battlebus rolled in to Newport on May 30, JRM climbed on a wall and used a loudhailer to heckle him as he went in to Cosy Hall to deliver an election speech, and continued to do so for a further 10 minutes.

He called on him to come outside and speak to the public. "We want to talk to you about our rights, the rights of a democracy not to surrender to Brussels, the rights of our citizens to keep our currency and our interest rates and not to find we are ruled by unelected bureaucrats in Frankfurt."

Moggy was not short of high level Tory support. Shadow Home Secretary Ann Widdecombe came to Newport planning to visit the town's police station. But police wouldn't allow her and Rees-Mogg inside, so they had to meet outside - police said they had to be impartial during the election.

Shadow defence secretary Iain Duncan-Smith popped along to Wellington, joining Moggy in speaking to shopkeepers and market stallholders. JRM also brought his party's "Keep the Pound" campaign to Wellington town centre.

Even his dad, Lord Rees-Mogg, campaigned for him locally.

As he settled in to the constituency, JRM had prepared the ground with some stunts. At Christmas 2000 he concocted a special Christmas delivery for the Labour Party offices in Wellington. It was, he said, a "sackful of Labour's empty promises."

This led to a complaint from Labour. It said it had been looking forward to the gift, but it never arrived - proof that the Tories did not deliver.

It was all to no avail. In the June 7, 2001, poll Peter Bradley cruised home in The Wrekin with 19,532 votes, to Jacob Rees-Mogg's 15,945. Bradley's majority of 3,587 was up on that of 1997.

Oh, if you're wondering, View 1 was from the Guardian columnist. And as for Sir John Major's Shropshire connections, his wife Norma was born in Much Wenlock, and his father Tom used to live at Higher Heath, near Whitchurch, with first wife Kitty, with whom he had a music hall act, until her death in 1928 when, it is said, a steel girder from a safety curtain fell on Kitty's head.