Sir Jacob William Rees-Mogg (b.1969)

He was born at Hammersmith, London, and grew up principally between London and Hinton Blewett in Somerset. His paternal family had lived at Cholwell House but his being Catholic comes not from Somerset, but his Irish-American grandmother, actress Beatrice Warren. He has been fixated with making money from childhood and after leaving Eton in 1989 (from where he commissioned his own portrait by Paul Brason, RP, at just 18-years old) was quoted as saying: "I want to make as much money as I can. Don't ask me what I want to do with it - that's secondary I think. Once one has got it then one can think about spending it. It's the having it that concerns me".

After leaving Oxford with a 2:1 in 1991, he went into banking as an investment manager and in 1993 moved to Hong Kong where he worked for Lloyd George Management (LGM). In 2005, despite a $4m, embarrassing, and easily avoidable 'oversight', Rees-Mogg was maintained by Lloyd-George (a family friend), only to repay his kindness by effectively staging a coup to take control of his company in 2007. That failed, and he left LGM with a number of colleagues and co-founded Somerset Capital Management. Somerset Capital collapsed in 2023 after its largest investor, St. James Place, was allowed to sever ties with the company and it lost an eye-watering £2-billion (two thirds of its assets) overnight. 

Both his grandfathers were involved in local politics: His mother's father, Thomas Morris, who was born and grew up in Hackney, East London, was a lorry driver in Ilford, Essex, and then a car salesman on the Euston Road before being elected a Conservative Councillor and then Mayor of St. Pancras; and, Fletcher Rees-Mogg, buoyed by his wife's American dollars, was Chairman of the Clutton Rural District Council and High Sheriff of Somerset. But, Jacob said: "My father (William Rees-Mogg), with whom I discussed all aspects of politics and finance, was the greatest influence in my professional life."

Jacob entered politics in 1997 and was the Conservative M.P. for North East Somerset from 2010 until he lost his seat in 2024. In 2012, he published an essay for the right wing think tank Politeia in which he made it clear - in line with his father's prophetic book, The Sovereign Individual - that he was for, “the individual against the state”. So perhaps unsurprisingly, he has been one of the leading voices pushing for a hard Brexit; Boris Johnson's Minister for Brexit Opportunities & Government Efficiency; and, Liz Truss's short-lived Secretary of State for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. He was given a knighthood in Boris Johnson's 2022 Prime Minister's Resignation Honours, and publicly stated that he wouldn't be giving it back after the ethics report that resulted in Johnson's resignation found that Johnson deliberately misled Parliament in Covid. Coincidentally, or not, Rees-Mogg was named in the same report as one of the two senior Tories to have mounted, “the most vociferous attacks... (waging) a campaign across newspapers, radio and social media to discredit the committee’s work and the seven MPs that serve on the cross-party group (in an attempt to) undermine procedures of the House of Commons.”

Siting his devout Catholic faith, Jacob stopped seeing a girlfriend in Hong Kong because of her status as a divorced woman; cannot condone abortion under any circumstances nor same-sex marriage; and, having been equally adamant that he would never marry a non-Catholic ("canon law requires Catholics to marry only other Catholics"), he made an exception to that rule to wed the Protestant aristocrat, Helena de Chair, sole heiress to one of the largest fortunes in the country. Michael Ashcroft's unofficial biography of Rees-Mogg relates that he proposed to her at her mother's home. Jacob's friend Glenys Roberts said, "Jacob told me he knew Helena was the right one when he first saw the Van Dyck portrait of Sir Thomas Wentworth, the 1st Earl of Stafford, who is considered an English Catholic martyr, hanging in (her) family picture gallery in Bourne Park... Jacob told me he dropped to his knees and proposed then and there." They were married in 2007 at Canterbury Cathedral - the spiritual home of the Protestant Church of England - and have six children. They live between 7 Cowley Street, London, and Gournay Court, Somerset.

In June 2023, Rees-Mogg announced on X that, "inheritance tax is unfair, economically harmful and trivial." In January 2024, the Treasury raked in a record high £5.7-billion through inheritance tax, prompting some sceptics to suggest that he may have had his 89-year old mother-in-law's fortune in mind: His wife is sole heir to her property and investments estimated at £45-million as well as the Fitzwilliam Art Collection, valued at £80-million. Even though the tax affects just 4% of the UK population, this would cost the Rees-Moggs an anything-but-trivial £50-million. However, Jacob is also an advocate of off-shore tax havens and on the back of his wealth and Catholic denomination has become a Knight of Malta, ie., a citizen of a sovereign state on a tax-friendly EU island, the significance and benefits of which are explained in Mogg Sr.'s The Sovereign Individual.