Rees-Mogg: My son got hate mail when I lost my seat. That’s loathsome

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has admitted he is “very strongly” considering standing at the next general election, despite the impact being a politician has had on his family.
The former Tory minister, who lost the constituency of North East Somerset to Labour by more than 5,000 votes on July 4, told a Fringe audience that his party “deserved” to lose the election.
Rees-Mogg, 55, told The Political Party with Matt Forde show on Sunday that he was not sure he would seek election in 2029 and said that his recent election loss was not a shock.
He said: “I am not absolutely certain but I love politics and I love being in the parliament. So I am thinking very strongly about standing again.”
Rees-Mogg told the McEwan Hall audience that he knew his party could not overcome a 20 per cent deficit in the opinion polls, “I wrote to my children at boarding school before the election to say, ‘Look, I will probably lose’. I tried my best to warn them.
“We governed badly, we hadn’t done what we told people we would do. We put up taxes when we said that we wouldn’t, we hadn’t dealt with migration and we hadn’t governed well. I can’t pretend we didn’t deserve it.”
He praised Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister, adding that he was impressed that Sunak had handled the election result with “great dignity”.
On Liz Truss, the short-lived prime minister under whom he served as business and energy secretary, Rees-Mogg said: “I think the attacks on her have become deeply unpleasant and go beyond the normal political criticism, and have become very personal. She is not a bad person.”
The father of six told the audience how his political life had affected the Rees-Mogg family, revealing that his eldest son, aged 16, received hate mail after the election.
“I think to send a piece of hate mail to a 16-year-old because you don’t like his father is an awful thing to do and just fundamentally nasty,” he said. “It is not my son’s fault that I have the political views that I do and it is cowardly, because if you don’t agree with me then you should get in touch with me — put your name on the bottom of it — but to write to a 16-year-old is just loathsome.”
Rees-Mogg was 27 when he was selected by the Conservatives to contest Central Fife, a traditional Labour seat, at the 1997 general election. He was accompanied on the campaign trail by the family’s nanny, Veronica Crook, and drove around the constituency in a Bentley.