Meet the Rees-Moggs review – my obsession with Jacob’s wife runs deep | Television

I often feel these days that I am going bonkers. Or that I am staying sane while the world goes bonkers around me, which amounts to the same thing. It is getting to the point where I will almost miss being disoriented if it ever stops.

There is no danger of that, however, for as long as Meet the Rees-Moggs exists. Yes, it is a reality show about the former Tory MP for North East Somerset, once described as “a haunted Victorian pencil”, Jacob Rees-Mogg, his wife, Helena, and their six children. “We had to try five times before we got one who looked like me,” says Helena, and she is right. Helena, I hazard a guess, is always right.

Do you know what I would do if I were a rich politician, had married an aristocratic heiress who was even richer, and had a lovely life split between a large house in London and a vast family pile for my massive family in Somerset? Not sign up to a reality show like an absolute berk, that’s what.

The why of it is a compelling question. On the one hand, a lust for fame does not jibe with what we know of poshos. On the other hand, anyone who puts together a persona as carefully as Jacob has over the years – and he is his own pastiche – is hardly someone not crying out for attention. Perhaps he thinks the show will do for him what appearing on Have I Got News for You did for Boris Johnson back in the day – make enough of the public fall for the act, and rise to power on that misbegotten popularity. If it works, we’ll deserve it.

Once the show begins, however, the why fades to a background hum as the Rees-Moggery begins. Contrary to expectations, Jacob seems overtly fond of and engaged with his children (three at home, three at boarding school). His daughter, Mary, says she often teaches him slang to amuse herself. “So,” we hear him ask her later at the dinner table, “‘wasteman’ is not rizz?” I’m not sure Helena gives any of her brood a thought if they are not in her eyeline, which I admire tremendously.

Helena quickly becomes the star of the show. The general election is announced. “The mood in the country,” she says, without moving her lips or jaw, “is anti-Conservative. Possibly with some justification, unfortunately.” It’s incredible. The words get out, but you cannot see how. The birthday of their fourth (I think) child, Anselm, falls on the day of Boris Johnson’s 60th birthday party, to which they are all going. Helena wonders if Anselm might want to do something in addition. Go-karting, he suggests. Helena computes this and agrees. Later, she preps the children for the likely outcome of the election. “Other careers are available.” Her wit is so dry it leaves you feeling sandpapered. I think she may become my new obsession.

The Rees-Moggs’ Catholicism is covered. “I’m very lucky to have my own chapel,” says Jacob, but there are plenty of truthful and non-risible remarks about the faith, too, plus an oddly endearing discussion with the children when one wonders whether transubstantiation isn’t a bit like, you know, cannibalism?

Their courtship is covered. She knew him as her friend Annunziata’s brother. He knew her as a descendant of one of his greatest political heroes, Thomas Wentworth. He told her all about him. “I staggered away after about 20 minutes,” says Helena (somehow, I still haven’t caught her in the act of enunciating). Before their first date, he tried to buy a book on Wentworth to give her, but it wasn’t in stock. So he bought her a pair of earrings instead – a move that suggests a degree of spontaneity in the Moggsian mind that is otherwise invisible. They both wanted lots of children, and that was that. Theirs is clearly a love match, though the L-word is never mentioned. His face lights up when she talks and especially when she teases him.

But the unexpectedly appealing scenes of their domestic life (yes, replete with staff and everything else you would have if you were sitting on a fortune, but also with children making jokes about poo, and Helena, to whom I have pledged allegiance by the end of episode two, delivering brutal apercus at every turn) contrast with interviews with people such as David Leverton. He is on the streets campaigning in the run-up to the election against Mogg and urging tactical voting to get him out. “Almost everything he stands for is bad,” he says, of the anti-abortion, pro-Brexit, anti-immigration MP. “He seems to despise people who are poorer [than he is] – which is almost all of us.” It is more than the Have I Got News for You team threw at Johnson. Whether it is enough to counteract the idiosyncratically charming picture painted elsewhere, we will have to wait and see.