‘My family have lots of nicknames for me – not all flattering’
After defecting to the Brexit Party, Annunziata Rees-mogg tells Associate Editor Camilla Tominey about growing up in the double-barrelled dynasty
ANNUNZIATA REES-MOGG – sister of Jacob, running mate of Nigel Farage – has been talking politics for 45 minutes when she reveals something quite extraordinary: “I love Eastenders!” she exclaims.
It is not what you might expect of the somewhat strait-laced former private schoolgirl and scion of one of the most recognisable double-barrelled dynasties in Britain.
Part of me is thinking, could she be doing this to appear “one of us”, in the same way male politicians rattle off a favourite football team, or which is their favourite out of Ant or Dec.
But the 40-year-old mother of two insists she has been glued to the BBC soap since the “Den and Angie” years: “I can watch it with one of my daughters just before bed. Because you know on Eastenders no one is going to swear. It’s kind of safe telly.”
So is she more of a Grant or Phil Mitchell kind of woman?
“Only Phil is still in it,” she points out, proving her credentials as unlikely superfan of the cockney soap. “I think part of the way they write
Eastenders is to make most of the characters people you don’t have a huge amount of sympathy for.”
In many ways, the same could be said of her family. The youngest of five Rees-mogg siblings, Annunziata – who recently defected from the Conservatives to stand as an MEP for the Brexit Party – appears to tick many unfashionable boxes: privileged and privately educated, ardently Eurosceptic, unashamedly capitalist and, of course, raised by the family nanny, Veronica Crook, who is now helping to bring up Jacob’s six children.
“Jacob is still absolutely Jacob and he’s never been any different,” she says. “He is completely true to himself. Yes, he’s got the odd mild eccentricity, but we adore him for him.”
Was she upset when her brother, nine years her senior, “poached” the legendary Veronica following his 2007 marriage to the fabulously named Helena Anne Beatrix Wentworth Fitzwilliam de Chair? (More on unusual names, later.)
“I can’t think of anyone I would rather help me bring up my own children. But as Jacob pointed out, he had children first. So he got first call. She comes to stay with me. She is another member of my family.”
Annunziata says she was not surprised her brother – who started reading the Financial Times aged 12 and introduced her to Tory party politics when she was five – wanted a big family. Despite the MP for North East Somerset’s much-criticised reputation for never having changed a nappy, his sister reveals: “Jacob adores children. He’s fantastically good with them. And no, it doesn’t surprise me. If you ask my daughters he is one of the funniest uncles they could imagine.”
So what was it like for Annunziata, now mother to Isadora, eight, and Molly, 13 months, growing up as a Rees-mogg? Did being the youngest – there is a huge age gap of 16 years to her eldest sister, Emma, and Jacob is nearly a decade older – mean she rarely got a word in?
“We’re a very, very politically minded family but we don’t all share the same views,” she admits.
Surely, there aren’t any Lefties among the Rees-mogg clan?
“They wouldn’t want me to comment,” Annunziata replies, hinting at her own comparatively liberal credentials by adding that her female friends are mostly “Left wing”.
By the time she was born in 1979, Annunziata’s father William Reesmogg, the legendary former editor of
The Times, and her mother Gillian Morris had downgraded from the sprawling Ston Easton Park near Bath to a modest grade II listed former rectory in the Somerset village of Hinton Blewett.
Far from being a Victorian household, where children were seen and not heard, Rees-mogg senior positively encouraged youthful input as he pored over the morning papers at breakfast.
“One of the great assets my family has is that they treat children as equals,” says Annunziata. “I remember once walking over Westminster Bridge with him and discussing Gorbachev. There probably weren’t a huge number of under-10-year-olds having conversations of that kind. But he just thought that a child’s perspective could always add a different insight and to take that seriously. I think there is a great deal of truth in that: from the mouths of babes.”
Annunziata admits she had “no intention of coming back into the political world at all” after trying and failing not once, but twice, to become a Tory MP in the 2005 and 2010 general elections. After being added to the Conservative A-list by David Cameron, the Rees-moggs were set to become the first brother and sister to be simultaneously elected as MPS, after standing for neighbouring Somerset seats nine years ago. But while Jacob won, Annunziata could not wrest Somerton and Frome from the sitting Liberal Democrat.
Cameron subsequently dropped her from the Tory party’s 2011 pre-selections, despite strong support from many female party members, a move which she doesn’t appear to have forgiven him for.
“One of the questions they asked me, bizarrely, was, ‘Would you stand as an MEP?’ in my final interview and I said, ‘I’m eight and a half months pregnant, I don’t feel able to give you an answer to that’. Clearly if they’d waited nine years they’d have got an answer that I’d be happy to stand!”
Asked if she would go back, say, if her brother became prime minister, she is resolute: “I think I’ve made my bed.”
Another chip on her shoulder is the way Cameron – keen to brandish his “one nation Tory” credentials – announced at a fundraising lunch that she should henceforth be known as Nancy Mogg. “It actually happened!” she recalls. “He told me it was a lovely name and he’d called his daughter it. I said it was absolutely lovely, but it’s not my name. My family have lots of nicknames for me, some more flattering than others. But at school I was called Nancy and I got rid of it as soon as I left.”
Her unusual name – Italian for annunciation – is generally understood to refer to the Virgin Mary receiving the word of the Angel Gabriel that she is to bear the Christ child; a reflection of the Rees-moggs’ staunch Roman Catholicism.
Her eldest sister Emma, 56, is a novelist, then there is Charlotte, 54, eldest brother Thomas, 52, and Jacob, 49. Between them, they have 16 children of their own, including
‘Jacob is absolutely Jacob... he’s got the odd eccentricity, but we adore him’
Jacob’s (Peter, Mary, Thomas, Anselm, Alfred and Sixtus), who range in age from 12 years to 18 months.
Having attended Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, west London, Annunziata had been expected to follow her siblings to university. But having missed four months of her final year due to illness – thought to be glandular fever, although she is reluctant to go in to details – she opted instead to enter the world of work.
A career in journalism beckoned, interspersed with stints working in investment banking in Hong Kong, public relations, as well as political activism; particularly campaigning against Britain joining the euro.
She became editor of Money Week and ended up as a leader writer on The
Telegraph before resigning in 2007 to stand again as an MP. However, it is only now, standing for Farage’s new Brexit Party, that she is attracting the kind of attention her brother has long been used to dealing with.
The internet, she declares, is “a vile world”, although she admits she found it “funny” to discover being described as both “Jacob in drag” and “quite fit” in the same Twitter thread.
Striking, svelte and wearing a chic blazer, she expresses surprise that criticism of her appearance has come from other women, including a female columnist who accused her of wearing plaits (she wasn’t) when she gave her big defection speech in a Coventry factory earlier this month.
“No one bothers commenting about how a male politician looks. It just belittles the people who write it,” she says. “As we’ve seen with politicians, particularly Labour female politicians across the country, some of the abuse they’ve had is absolutely despicable.”
Home for Annunziata is Lincolnshire; a house she insists is “falling apart” (a Zoopla search reveals it was bought three years ago for less than a million) and shares with her husband Matthew Glanville, a management consultant and former soldier.
Pointing to their youngest daughter, who has accompanied her to the interview in a pushchair, she says: “This one is too young to read, but the other one doesn’t have access to the internet. And I’m certainly not going to encourage it.” What, so the eightyear-old doesn’t even have a tablet?
“She’s got nothing except an old phone that’s not connected to our
Wi-fi and hasn’t got a sim card, so no messaging. Nothing.”
Having been brought up by a nanny, Annunziata wanted to be around for her daughters and so only hires what she describes as a “mother’s help” on a part-time basis.
Admitting to having had a “very lucky upbringing”, she is proud of her roots: “I never chose my parents, I didn’t choose my unusual name. I have grown up in the way I’ve grown up. I wish that everyone could be as lucky and because I believe in aspiration, I believe in making a success of everyone’s lives and enabling people to do well through their lives. I wish more people could have that kind of chance.”
Warming to her theme, she says of Brexit: “I didn’t want to get back into politics but I felt I had to. The real thing that got me to come back into the political arena, was seeing people so disillusioned. Seeing the graffiti that said, ‘Don’t vote, act’, scared me. It’s on a bridge on the A1, as you go north; 17.4million people have become politically homeless and I hope to represent them – and I include Labour voters in that.”
A double-barrelled former banker with a multi-millionaire MP brother may not seem like your typical working-class champion, but then Annunziata has always had a soft spot for a cockney.
‘I never chose my parents, my name … I wish that everyone could be as lucky’