He who will prepare a table for us in the presence of our enemies

Why is Jacob Rees-Mogg so mocked and derided? Theresa May said she “giggled” when it was suggested he might be a candidate for the Tory leadership.

“Giggled”? That’s nothing: I wept when the stupendously incompetent and inept Theresa May was promoted to high office.

In fact Rees-Mogg is by no means universally mocked. That still considerable number of sensible and informed people, who can read behind the blather of the headlines and the idiocy of the political commentators, see in Jacob much to admire. His speeches and articles are well-received.

But he is derided. Never mind: he is derided only by those people for whom we ought to reserve our derision. You know who I mean: the political timeservers, the consensus-mongers, the whole flatulent rabble of politicians who, since the end of the Second World War, have seen their task only as managed decline. In other words, Jacob is derided by the mediocratic establishment.

It is easy to see why they despise him. He is not one of them.

He speaks English and writes elegantly while his detractors in politics and the press only babble, more or less ungrammatically, the cliches which they believe the people want to hear.

He tells the truth. For instance the truth that if you reduce taxation you actually produce more revenue for the exchequer.

The political class in the parliamentary parties and in the press would have us believe that money belongs to the government and that policy is the business of politicians as they decide how much money they will allocate to the docile population. Rees-Mogg speaks the truth plainly when he says: “The government doesn’t have any money of its own. It has only that which it extracts from the public through taxation.”

And he adds, “The public sector doesn’t generate any money at all, but only recycles that made available to it by the private sector.”

And Jacob actually knows something worth knowing. He has what Denis Healey  described as a “hinterland.” He is a classicist and a music lover. Compare and contrast with such as David Cameron who prefers to hang out with the head-bangers at pop festivals. Or Peter Mandelson and Gideon Osborne who once liked to be seen with Russian oligarchs on their yachts.

He has a sense of humour – not to be confused with the witless gurgling of politicians trying to tell a joke and the posturing belly-laughs of their hearers..

Jacob has an acute and informed political sensibility derived from his reading of history, the Greek philosophers and the Roman poets. What do his detractors know? The best of them know only management studies and the worst of them the positivistic claptrap of PPE. These people are monochrome political wonks. What does he know of politics, who only politics knows?

Almost worst of all – I’m saving the absolute worst of all for the end – Jacob is a traditional family man and attends the Catholic Mass in Latin. And there is conspicuous hostility to both those persuasions on the part of the politically-correct diversity-mongers and equality-salesmen in the the administrative class

So what, according to his uncultured despisers, is Jacob’s worst fault?

Why, he is a traditional Tory of course. That is, as the fatuous Mrs May, remarked of “the nasty party.”