Jacob Rees-Mogg has become one of the Conservatives’ most successful users of the social media site Twitter — and all he needed was 22 days and a Latin proverb.
The MP, whose nickname is “the Moggster”, gets more “likes” and “shares” per tweet than any member of the cabinet, including his boss, Theresa May.
For every tweet, Rees-Mogg typically achieves 1,574 likes from other users, compared with an average for cabinet members of just 56, according to research by this newspaper.
Just three weeks after joining Twitter, he has already received more likes than Amber Rudd, the home secretary, who joined in 2012.
In keeping with his status as a man who is more likely to use Latin than slang, Rees-Mogg, 48, used his first foray on Twitter to say: “Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis”(“The times change, and we change with them”). So far, it has attracted 3,500 likes and 1,800 shares.
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By comparison, Rudd’s tweet yesterday about enjoying a trip to a local exhibition in her constituency of Hastings and Rye, East Sussex, notched up 14 likes and three shares.
Rees-Mogg has proved just as popular on Instagram, where he recently posted a photograph of his sixth child, Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher. As with the number of likes he attracts on Twitter, he beats the cabinet on the size of his family, too.