John Thames

Jacob Rees-Mogg has been talking about duty and upset people, quite rightly. If war comes, he says, people must join up. Some may have to die. That is how countries last. Rome fell when citizens paid others to fight. The line would be ordinary if it came from a man of the nation. It is damaging because it comes from a man who once seemed to stand with the nation against something else. A few years ago Michael Rainsborough and I argued that Western government had ceased to be national in the ordinary sense and become imperial: a system of management over peoples, not a home belonging to a people. Empires do not need citizens. They need subjects, communities, and a priesthood of progress. The nation state asks for loyalty among equals. The new arrangement asks for deference to a civilising mission aimed, more and more, at the historic population itself. Brexit was a sovereign native revolt against that. It was not a tantrum about trade. It was a people saying they would not be administered as a province of a postnational order. In 2016–19 Rees-Mogg looked as if he understood the distinction. He treated the referendum as a valid instruction. That put him on the national side of the only argument that mattered. The slouch in the Commons in September 2019 was easy to misread as mere insult. At the time it could be taken as something colder and, in its way, political: magisterial unconcern toward the people who thought the vote was an outrage to be managed away. He would not sit up for them. Many of us forgave the manners because the target of the manners seemed right. Turley was correct that the pose was ugly. She was wrong about what the fight was. The new interview wrecks the alibi. The same loucheness is still there. The object has changed. He is no longer declining to perform anxiety for the postnational court. He is reciting its war liturgy and calling it duty. The men who are to kill and die are not being asked to defend a bordered people. They are being invited to service an imperium that still cannot hold a coast, still treats national self-assertion as a public-order problem, and still speaks the language of progress when it means rule. That is why the sofa now looks different. In 2019 the sprawl could pass for aristocratic refusal. In 2026 it reads as arrogance, detachment, dishonesty and stupidity: the ease of a man who will not live the risk he names. On Russia the sermon moralises what does not need moral theatre. States act from interest. Russia has a historically intelligible one in its near abroad. Kennan and others said that driving a victorious alliance onto the ruins of Russian power would produce a collision. The collision came. One may dislike Moscow’s answer. Ascribing ‘brutality’ as if it were the point is a progressive habit: turn strategy into sin so that the only virtuous pose is imperial supervision of the sinner. As wars are fought, this one has not been the cartoon of indiscriminate slaughter the commentary requires. Whether one grants that or not is secondary. The primary fact is simpler. Russia is behaving like a nation. Britain’s elite is not. That is the disgrace in what Rees-Mogg said. He had the chance to remain what Brexit briefly suggested he was: a spokesman for a country that still existed as a country. Instead he talks now like a provincial officer of the progressive imperium, surprised that the natives might object to dying for a project that has spent a generation dissolving them. Duty, from that perspective, doesn’t come across honestly. It feels like the Union flag being draped deceitfully over the progressive imperial agenda. The slouch in 2019 was a tell. Then it said: I will not be hustled by the managerial elite. Now it says: I am comfortable among them. A foolish man, which I now think he is, can be right only sometimes. The blithe pose now grates heavily. I wouldn’t trust the lives of my son and daughter to this project and its exponents. Just back TF off.