Dan Rees

Born: 1982

Biography:

Jacob William Rees-Mogg is a British politician serving as the Member of Parliament (MP) for North East Somerset since the general election of 2010. A member of the Conservative Party, his views have been characterised as socially conservative and as on the hard-right of the party.
Rees-Mogg was born in Hammersmith, London, and educated at Eton College. He then studied History at Trinity College, Oxford, and was President of the Oxford University Conservative Association. He worked in the City of London for Lloyd George Management until 2007, then co-founded a hedge fund management business, Somerset Capital Management LLP. Rees-Mogg has amassed a significant fortune: in 2016, he and his wife had a combined net worth estimated at more than £100 million. Moving into politics, he unsuccessfully contested the 1997 and 2001 general elections before being elected as the MP for North East Somerset in 2010. He was re-elected in 2015 and 2017. Within the Conservative Party, he joined the traditionalist and socially conservative Cornerstone Group.
Under David Cameron's government, Rees-Mogg was one of the parliamentary Conservative Party's most rebellious members, opposing the government on issues such as the introduction of same-sex marriage and further intervention in the Syrian Civil War. He became known for his speeches and filibustering in parliamentary debates. A Eurosceptic, he proposed a Conservative coalition with the UK Independence Party and campaigned for the Leave side in the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. He subsequently joined pro-Brexit pressure groups Leave Means Leave and the European Research Group, becoming chairman of the latter. He attracted support through the social media campaign Moggmentum, and has been promoted as a potential successor to Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May.
Rees-Mogg is a controversial figure in British politics; he has been praised as a conviction politician whose anachronistic upper-class mannerisms and consciously traditionalist attitudes are often seen as entertaining, and has been dubbed the "Honourable Member for the 18th century". On the other hand, critics view him as a reactionary figure, and some of his positions have made him the target of organised protest and criticism.
Rees-Mogg was born in Hammersmith on 24 May 1969, the youngest son of William Rees-Mogg (1928–2012), a former editor of The Times newspaper, created a life peer in 1988, by his wife Gillian Shakespeare Morris, a daughter of Thomas Richard Morris, a Conservative party local government politician and Mayor of St Pancras in London. He was one of five children, having three elder siblings, Emma Beatrice Rees-Mogg (born 1962), Charlotte Louise Rees-Mogg (born 1964) and Thomas Fletcher Rees-Mogg (born 1966), and one younger sister, Annunziata Rees-Mogg (born 1979).
Prior to his birth, in 1964 the family purchased Ston Easton Park, a country house located near the village of Ston Easton in Somerset, where Rees-Mogg grew up attending weekly mass and occasionally Sunday school at the Church of the Holy Ghost, Midsomer Norton. Here he started catechism in 1975 under his governess and attended mass in the ordinary form. A few years later, in 1978, the family moved to the nearby village of Hinton Blewett where they purchased The Old Rectory, a Grade II listed former rectory, today valued at £2 million. Living in Somerset, he regularly commuted to his family's second home in Smith Square, London, where he also attended independent boys' prep school Westminster Under School.
Growing up, Rees-Mogg was primarily raised by the family's nanny Veronica Crook, whom he describes as a formative figure. Crook now looks after Rees-Mogg's own children, having worked for the family for over 50 years.
When Rees-Mogg was ten, he was left £50 by a distant cousin and his father, on his behalf, invested in shares in the now-defunct General Electric Company (GEC). Rees-Mogg ascribes to this event the beginnings of his interest in stock markets. Having learned how to read company reports and balance sheets, he later attended a shareholders' meeting at GEC, where he voted against a motion because dividends were too low. He subsequently invested in London-based conglomerate Lonrho, eventually owning 340 shares, and reportedly caused the company's chairman Lord Duncan-Sandys "discomfort" by quizzing him at an annual general meeting on the low dividends offered to shareholders. At GEC in 1981, where he now owned 175 shares, he told the chairman Lord Nelson that the dividend on offer was "pathetic", sparking amusement among board members and media.
After prep school, Rees-Mogg entered Eton College, where he was described by a former teacher as a dogmatic Thatcherite with high opinions but never rebellious. Upon leaving Eton, he had his portrait painted by Paul Branson RP for the Eton College Collections, which was later put in display during the Faces of 1993 Royal Society of Portrait Painters exhibit.

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