In a monumental evening for UK politics, which saw MPs locked in a meeting from half past two until almost 11pm, Leader of the House and Bizarre Edwardian Cartoon Jacob Rees-Mogg was visibly overcome with fatigue and/or contempt on the front benches of the Commons. Look, we’re all exhausted by Brexit – but you’d think that, in the desperate scramble to keep our country from hurtling off a cliff edge, those charged with leading the way would feel invested enough to sit up straight. While Jacob lounged – provocatively, defiantly, sulkily – across the benches, like a demonstratively grumpy child who wants his nanny to take him home early from school, Green MP Caroline Lucas delivered a scalding remonstrance.
‘The Leader of the House, I have to say, with his body language throughout this evening, has been so contemptuous of this house’, said Lucas, prompting shouts of support from MPs who called ‘Sit up!’, ‘Sit up, man!’, ‘Sit up straight!’ at Rees-Mogg (whose eye rolling, BTW, didn’t do much to redeem his impression of a beleaguered 11-year-old). Lucas continued, describing how, ‘The Leader of the House has been spread across around three seats, lying out as if that was something very boring for him to listen to tonight.’ Past his bedtime, probably.
‘While [Rees Mogg] has been lecturing us about democracy, we will have none of it’, concluded Lucas. The internet had a field day, of course. Eminently memeable Rees-Mogg will have woken this morning to find his prone image transposed onto comfy graphs of the plummeting Pound against the Euro, taken as a downward curve to illustrate the dwindling majority of his government, as well as a Millais Ophelia and Rose From Titanic (Draw Me Like One Of Your Front Bench Girls). Good work, class. Pity the prefect’s asleep at his post.