Jacob Rees-Mogg’s tribute to his idols of the Victorian age is trite, tedious and muddle-headed
Jacob Rees-Mogg is the stupid kind of Tory’s idea of what a clever kind of Tory ought to sound like. He knows a few long and obscure words. He can employ a smattering of the Latin phrases that he picked up during his education at an expensive academy near Slough. Among the easily bamboozled, the double-breasted suits, the retro spectacles and the patrician drawl can be confused with seriousness. So I suppose that this attempt to show that he deserves a reputation as a Tory intellectual may do quite well at the bookshop at the next Conservative conference. Yet even the dimmer type of Tory may twig that they have been duped once they embark on 400-plus pages of inch-deep ponderings conveyed in plodding prose.
Far from being the “bold” and “landmark” work puffed by the publishers, his shallow thesis is that the Victorian age was one of “moral certainty”, “wise confidence”, “tremendous energy” and “patriotism”, qualities that Rees-Mogg finds lamentably lacking in our own era of “moral relativism” presided over by “the present-day politically correct elite”. This is glibly insulting about modern Britain and does terrible injury to the Victorian age. The 19th century saw tremendous economic, social, cultural, political and philosophical ferment, which changed every aspect of life as Britain transformed into an industrialised, urbanised country and at the same time ruled the largest territorial empire the world has ever witnessed. Rees-Mogg claims an ambition to restore the reputation of this vivid period of history. All he achieves with this awful book is to make a shipwreck of his own pretensions as they are repeatedly dashed on the rocks of his incoherent thoughts before sinking under the dead weight of his lifeless language.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2X4Hn01
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