William Rees-Mogg's autobiography is a memorable book. Memorable, unfortunately, for mostly the wrong reasons. Rees-Mogg is a grand old man of letters, and one of the most dedicated and prolific journalists of the 20th century. His public actions – from writing the famous Times editorial defending Mick Jagger for a drug conviction with the Alexander Pope quotation "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?", to standing shoulder to shoulder with Rupert Murdoch as he broke the print unions in the 1980s – rank alongside some of the more notable deeds that any newspaper editor has accomplished. Yet his blandly written but sometimes unintentionally hilarious memoirs are themselves in need of a good edit.
Rees-Mogg's book has two major flaws. First is his penchant for meaningless name-dropping, which verges on the compulsive. A young French dressmaker his mother encounters is, of course, Coco Chanel. He nearly met John Maynard Keynes for tea in Hampstead, "but [he] was delayed by the debate on the American loan in the House of Commons; a fortnight later he was dead." Virtually everyone significant in his life he met while up at Oxford, from a young Murdoch stopping him in the street to ask his advice about whether he should buy a student magazine (Rees-Mogg counselled against it and Murdoch refrained) to Margaret Thatcher, whom he helped to elect as president of the Conservative Association. Jackie Kennedy was "in some sense phoney". And so on. Matters aren't helped by Rees-Mogg's recurring forgetfulness. He describes a "happy" meeting between Murdoch and the Queen, and then says, "I cannot remember a word that was said."
The second fault is that of Pooterish banality. You will struggle to find any great revelation of political or journalistic skulduggery in these pages, though there is an entertaining story of a hot-water bottle bursting in Harold Macmillan's bedroom. ("The evening was rounded off sleeping in a sodden four-poster.")
Rees-Mogg writes that "my life has been exceptionally fortunate and happy", and the best and most heartfelt parts of the book are those that deal with his family, whether his actress mother or his MP son, Jacob, whose unapologetically high-Tory views are guyed on Twitter by an imposter. Should the anonymous prankster, or even Jacob himself, step forward to write a memoir, it would probably be considerably more entertaining than this collection of measured banalities and grandly privileged utterances.
