Jacob Rees-Mogg’s little learning is an irritating thing

He has made the same mistakes that amateur pedants always make

I am in favour of ministers who care about language. When Michael Gove became education secretary in 2010 he issued a list of banned words and phrases for his civil servants. “Safeguarding” was out, to be replaced by “child protection”. Quite right too.

But I am afraid that Jacob Rees-Mogg, the new leader of the House of Commons, has made a fool of himself with his instructions to his new office for how he would like documents to be written. He has made the same mistakes that amateur pedants always make. Writing as an amateur pedant myself, I feel deep sympathy for him.

His first mistake is to assume that just because he was taught something once, that is how it ought to be. When I learned to touch type in 1980, the convention was to put two spaces after a full stop, because that looks better in typescripts, especially double-spaced ones, which were the norm.

But computer layouts look fine with a single space, and so most people have learned to do that now. I was surprised to learn that as many as 24 per cent of people still use a double space, but it is now a minority pursuit for personal communication. Commercial publishers such as The Independent spend a measurable amount of time doing find and replace on raw copy to make it consistent.

Rees-Mogg’s second mistake is to fall foul of Muphry’s Law, which holds: “If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.”

Thus Rees-Mogg wrote “fullstops” as one word when most sticklers would have two. And he gave Tobias Ellwood as an example of how to style an MP who isn’t a privy counsellor, and who should therefore have “Esq” after his name. Not only did Rees-Mogg spell “privy councillors”, er, unconventionally, but Ellwood was appointed to the privy council in 2017. Not only that, but he is a lieutenant colonel in the army reserve, so he wouldn’t be an “Esq” anyway.

As I say, having written a book called The Banned List that had a spelling mistake in the acknowledgements, I feel sorry for him.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator