Jacob Rees-Mogg is as clueless about Conservative history as he is about Conservative present

If anything should demonstrate the impossibility of Theresa May’s task ahead, Rees-Mogg’s deranged dance around the maypole of Conservative history might just be it

Jacob Rees-Mogg was born in 1969 at the age of 45 and immediately became a member of the aristocracy, much to shock of his entirely middle class parents.

Today, he lives simultaneously in the years 2018 and 1867 so he can be forgiven for being, in a historical sense, so spectacularly all over the place.

Theresa May has four days to find a way to bring her hopelessly divided party together over Brexit, and if anything should demonstrate the impossibility of the task ahead, Jacob Rees-Mogg’s deranged dance around the maypole of Conservative history and present on the front of Monday’s Daily Telegraph might just be it.

For not only do we learn that Theresa May must deliver on “promises” made at the general election of 2017, promises the voters very clearly tore up in front of her and dropped in the bin on the way to the polling station.

We also discover that Theresa May risks becoming a 21st century Robert Peel, by “break[ing] a manifesto pledge” (on the repeal of the Corn Laws), and then leaving the Conservatives out of “majority power” for decades.

May, we must assume, does not have much spare time to digest these wild threats before the big Chequers meeting on Friday, so it was kind of Rees-Mogg to put his most ridiculous assertion right at the top.

“The prime minister said, as soon as she took office, that ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and in the last election, in her personal contract with the British people, she declared that we would leave the single market and the customs union,” he writes. “At Chequers this week the nation will see if her promises are kept.”

Now, it cannot be known beyond doubt what century Rees-Mogg was living in when he wrote this, so it is perhaps possible that, despite standing in the 2017 general election, he is unaware of the result of it.

It is possible he is yet to discover that, after Theresa May patiently set out the negotiating position he describes, she then went round the country for long weeks, pleading with voters to “strengthen my hand in the negotiation with Brussels”, and the voters thought about it long and hard, and gave a resounding “no”.

He may not have heard her declare, in speeches, in party political broadcasts, on leaflets he may very well himself have pushed through doors in west Somerset, that “If I lose just six seats I will lose this election and Jeremy Corbyn will be sitting down to negotiate with Europe.”

In that election, she said nothing beyond this sound bite and two others on rotation for almost two months. The public heard them loud and clear. Even if it didn’t want to. And then the public took not six but twelve from her. And yet here is Jacob Rees-Mogg, compelling the prime minister to make good on a promise the public have already said no to, for no greater reason than he wants her to.

None of which even begins to address the ridiculous comparison between the 1841 election and the 2017 election, between Theresa May and Robert Peel.

That Robert Peel is arguably best known, almost two centuries later, for founding the police force, and Theresa May was until recently arguably best known for cutting 20,000 police officers then staring them in the eye and telling them to stop “crying wolf” about it, is perhaps the point at which comparisons between the two should end.

But let us, on this glorious summer day, delve a little bit further into the repeal of the Corn Laws of 1845, as Jacob Rees-Mogg compels us to.

It is essentially agreed by historians that Peel won the election of 1841 with the backing of old Tory protectionists, who wanted to keep the Corn Laws in place, and so carry on being artificially enriched by poor people paying taxes on their bread. And then, four years later, Peel retreated to his own free-trade principles, motivated to try to lower food prices because there was a widespread famine occurring in Ireland.

Ideologically, Rees-Mogg is on Peel’s side of the protectionist debate, but that his modern recasting of the issue lands him on the side of keeping the rich rich and starving the poor is no surprise.

(Then there’s the secondary fact, that modern day Tory “free traders” like Rees-Mogg are dragging their country out of the world’s largest free-trade bloc, in the false promise of trade deals that cannot possibly hope to make up for what will be lost. But that particular bit of 42 carat nonsense, while no less stupid than it has always been, has now become boring to bring up.)

More to the point, even GCSE students of the corn laws debate can probably recall that Peel’s 1841 election victory had as much to do with policy as it did with his status as a “statesman and able administrator”, a second point at that all analogies with the present day should surely end.

All of which is such high-grade jibberish there is barely time even to interrogate the low grade stuff, like the fact that, three years ago, the Conservatives were returned to “majority power” for the first time in almost a quarter of a century, before the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, not Theresa May, agitated so hard to smash it all to pieces.

Robert Peel had an ideologically divided party but a thumping commons majority. He was not at the mercy of mad cliques of backbenchers threatening to bring him down through the medium of absurd historical analogies on the front of the newspapers, however much those mad backbenchers might wish.

The Conservatives are already out of majority office. It’s Brexit that has done it to them, and yet here is Jacob Rees-Mogg steaming in like an 18th century physician, demanding the only cure for Brexit is harder Brexit. This is a diagnosis Theresa May has already admitted crying over at 10pm on 8 June last year. So it may just be that she has a different view.

So be warned, Ms May, listen to Jacob Rees-Mogg: honour the promise you’ve already been told by the voters you can’t keep, or face losing what you’ve already lost. And if not, he will haunt your dreams forever, in this century, and the one before.