William Rees Mogg: the memoirs

What did you think of Ted Heath? “Well, I liked him, but he could be appallingly difficult.” That said, “He was a serious and important figure to a degree which people don’t at the moment realise”. What about Harold Wilson, you didn’t seem to have much time for him? “He was frightfully dodgy at the way he handled difficult issues.” Rees-Mogg remembers a dinner in 1966 at which the Labour Prime Minister suggested that he would approve the sale of The Times to the owners of The Sunday Times if the paper sacked its then troublesome political correspondent. (The sale was approved; Rees-Mogg was appointed Editor; Harold Wilson’s advice on staff changes was ignored.) “There was always this feeling that there was something absurd about what Harold Wilson was up to.”

Jim Callaghan was “a bit lucky to become Prime Minister”. John Major was “indecisive and alienated both wings of his party. He was unlucky in coming after a major prime minister and not being of that calibre.” Tony Blair seemed, if anything, too appealing. “I always thought there must be something wrong about [the Blair project].” Rees-Mogg ran into the future PM in the mid-1990s, when both men were changing planes en route to a Bilderberg conference. As they waited for their connection, Blair talked widely. “Everything he said,” recalls Rees-Mogg, a lifelong Tory, “I approved of. And I knew that I wouldn’t make a good Labour prime minister.”

David Cameron? “Basically favourable ... He’s a shrewd professional, probably not a great Prime Minister but a very competent one ... I would compare him more to Harold Macmillan than all the other Conservative prime ministers.”

Rees-Mogg has some misgivings about the mission to modernise the Tory party. He still does not understand what the Big Society is. He does not think people were persuaded by the idea of a progressive Conservative party at the election and are even less so now. “Somebody said to me: ‘Well, at least he looks like a Prime Minister.’ ”

Even when the conversation turns to Baroness Thatcher, whom he talks about in a more serious, reverential tone, Rees-Mogg sounds like a man bantering about an old friend from university. Which, of course, she is: Lady Thatcher, along with Rupert Murdoch, was a contemporary at Oxford. He does not count himself a close friend. “I was never, and probably shouldn’t have been, a member of the inner circle,” he says. Keith Joseph, the Conservative politician widely credited as helping to create what became known as Thatcherism, was a much closer intellectual influence, he says, going on to reveal that her close friends have been those people at one step removed from frontline politics. And Denis, her husband, was enormously important: “He had excellent good sense and was generally devoted to her. His own views were largely discounted, I think, because he was so extremely right-wing. But he was good rugger referee.”

Lady Thatcher, though, stands out for distinct praise: “She was really an excellent Prime Minister. She was a simplifier, she tried to get an argument down to a sort of brief in which you could say yes and no, get definite decisions.” He liked her best in what you might call her Goldilocks years: early on, both as Leader of the Opposition and as PM, she was “learning the job”; in office, she was “very self-confident and decisive”; the “middle period”, ie, the years between 1983 and 1987, were, in his opinion, Lady Thatcher at her best.

This is a typically Moggish observation, in its politics and personality. For it marks Rees-Mogg’s appreciation for the bold economic liberalism of Nigel Lawson in his most critical years as Chancellor, but also captures the moderation that is an essential quality of Rees-Mogg’s character.

These were the characteristics of his historic editorship of The Times. Rees-Mogg took over the paper less than a year after it started putting news on the front page, but he was a journalist more interested in ideas than stories. For more than 14 years as Editor — he edited the paper almost exactly as long as Sir William Haley — the leader column and the letters page dominated his day. (He wrote many leaders and hand-picked the letters, choosing 20 or so from a selection of about 60 presented to him every afternoon.) Carefulness, at times, led him astray. The Times backed Willie Whitelaw, rather than Margaret Thatcher, for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1975. Why? “Moderation, essentially,” he says. “The Times’ culture is inherently a rather moderate, English pragmatic culture. That’s the attitude to the world of a fairly high proportion of Times readers.”

And yet arguably the most significant contribution that Rees-Mogg’s paper made to modern Britain was in making the case for monetarism — a radical one at the time. Peter Jay, the Times US economic correspondent, used his time in the States to get to know the Chicago school of economists and understand monetarism as an alternative to price controls. Jay made the monetarist argument in the pages of the paper and, to be sure, in the ear of his father-in-law, Jim Callaghan. In short, The Times, its leader column and its economic correspondent were instrumental in the switch from the Keynesian orthodoxy to monetarism, the most important economic conversion within British government in the years since the Second World War. For all his moderation and pragmatism, Rees-Mogg’s paper rolled the pitch for Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph and Nigel Lawson in the 1980s.

Ironically, of course, Rees-Mogg, dressed as ever in a heavy dark blue pinstriped suit and wearing a discreetly patterned blue silk tie, also has his place in the history of rock’n’roll. In July 1967 he wrote a muscular leader in defence of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones who, after a drugs bust at Redlands, Richards’ Sussex estate, had been handed prison sentences for their first offences.

But if this was The Times taking an anti-Establishment position, it did so for the most conservative reasons of fairness: “Actually, I was making a legal point and I was convinced that this was a miscarriage of justice because it reflected the judges’ dislike of certain aspects of modern life. Mick Jagger was being punished for what he stood for, not for what he’d done.” (For Rees-Mogg, the personal poignancy of that famous leader is that for half a century since it has encouraged people to misquote his greatest literary hero, Alexander Pope. Rees-Mogg borrowed the line “Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?” as the headline for the leader. It appeared in the paper the next morning, sub-edited for brevity at the expense of poetry to “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?”) It remains an inspiring piece of writing from a journalist with a knack for making Olympian judgments. And nearly half a century later, it bears re-reading.

Those Olympian judgments have, on occasion, also been heroically wrong. He acknowledges in his Memoirs that his defence of Richard Nixon was overdone. (In conversation, he still wonders whether the Republican President had done anything much worse than his Democrat predecessors: “Lyndon Johnson had been at least as bad, probably worse, and Kennedy, after all, had stolen the election in 1960.”) And, of course, his various predictions have earned himself a place in the Private Eye pantheon as Mystic Mogg.

In an entirely surprising way, the patrician Tory does show himself in the book to have a touch of the West Country mystic about him. Towards the end of his Memoirs, Rees-Mogg recounts his experience of the family banshee, who has visited him in his dreams forewarning first of his father’s death and later of his mother’s impending death. On the second occasion he refused to accept the banshee into his dreams, grabbed her broom and pushed her out of the room. A short while later, his mother had a fall, but survived. In his mysticism, his Roman Catholicism and his discussion of the depression that afflicted him in his teenage years, Rees-Mogg offers more emotional intimacy than you might expect. But, then, it is all too easy to forget that this is the son of an American actress — Beatrice Warren, born in New York, from an Irish-American family — as well as a Somerset grandee: Fletcher Rees-Mogg, whose grandfather William built the estate on which young Rees-Mogg grew up.

Rees-Mogg has described himself as a man of the country who spends much of his time in London. Indeed, his Memoirs give life to his many lives: the enthusiastic antiquarian bookseller who built a small but successful publishing business; the vice-chairman of the BBC who so grew to dislike the politicking of the Corporation’s producers; the director of GEC who revered the founder, Arnold Weinstock, and came to revile the Chairman, Jim Prior.

Through it all there is a sense, too, of a man who has witnessed modern history unfold, but with a gleam in his eye for another age: the 18th century. Perhaps the most revealing thing about Rees-Mogg is his list of heroes: Pope, John Locke, the political philosopher, William Pitt, the Prime Minister, and Joshua Reynolds, the painter. Looking at him sitting in the Garrick, his tall, angular shape folded into a deep chair, it is easy to imagine him in their company. Indeed, their presence runs through his memoirs, through his life and through the pages of the paper he edited. The 18th century appeals to him, he says, because it was a time when England reimagined itself with ambition and a sense of history. “They looked back at the Classical period of Rome and arrived at a whole new Anglo-Latin culture.”

Rees-Mogg has led a public life, even a political one, but has never been a politician. He was heavily involved in politics at Oxford and in his Memoirs he recounts how he imagined the summit of his ambitions as a student was either to serve in the Cabinet or end up as Editor of The Times. He stood for Parliament in 1956 as a Conservative Party candidate for the seat of Chester-le-Street and lost. After two of his children stood at the last election, he has a son, Jacob, in the House of Commons and a daughter, Annunziata, who just missed out on winning the neighbouring seat. So he has spent a lifetime opining on politics from the sidelines and, as a Times columnist, continues to do so today. Does he regret never having got involved in politics?

“No, I came to the conclusion that actually journalism was something that I did better than I would have done politics,” he says. “Also, I was very aware that in journalism you have a much longer time in which you’re a sort of living force.” In that argument, he is Exhibit A.

Memoirs by William Rees-Mogg is published by HarperCollins on July 7, rrp £30, available to preorder from The Times Bookshop for £22 at thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or 0845 2712134