Jacob William Rees-Mogg (b.1969)

He was born at Hammersmith, London, and grew up principally between London and Hinton Blewett in Somerset. His paternal family lived at Cholwell House but his being Catholic comes not from Somerset, but his Irish-American grandmother, actress Beatrice Warren. He has been fixated with making money from childhood and after leaving Eton in 1989 (from where he commissioned his own portrait by Paul Brason, RP, at just 18-years old) was quoted as saying: "I want to make as much money as I can. Don't ask me what I want to do with it - that's secondary I think. Once one has got it then one can think about spending it. It's the having it that concerns me".

Jacob inherited his interest in finance and politics from his father who in turn stated in his memoirs that, "my interest in business and politics comes from my American side". After leaving Oxford in 1991, he went into banking as an investment manager and in 1993 moved to Hong Kong where he worked for Lloyd George Management. He was maintained after making a very expensive error and then repaid Lloyd George's kindness by effectively staging a coup. That failed and instead he left the company with a number of colleagues and co-founded Somerset Capital Management in 2007. Somerset Capital collapsed in 2023 after its largest investor, St. James Place, severed ties with the company and it lost an eye-watering £2-billion overnight. Rees-Mogg is an advocate of off-shore tax havens and on the back of his wealth and Catholic denomination has become a Knight of Malta, ie., a citizen of a sovereign state on a tax-friendly EU island, the significance and benefits of which are explained in his father's prophetic book, The Sovereign Individual.

Both his grandfathers were involved in local politics: His mother's father, Thomas Morris, grew up in Hackney, East London, and was a lorry driver in Ilford, Essex, and then a car salesman on the Euston Road before being elected a Conservative Councillor and then Mayor of St. Pancras; and, Fletcher Rees-Mogg, buoyed by his wife's American dollars, was Chairman of the Clutton Rural District Council and High Sheriff of Somerset. Jacob entered politics in 1997 and followed his father's anti-EU views. He is currently one of the leading voices pushing for a hard Brexit, the Conservative M.P. for North East Somerset, and was Boris Johnson's Minister for Brexit Opportunities & Government Efficiency.

Siting his strict Catholic faith, he stopped seeing a girlfriend in Hong Kong because of her status as a divorced woman; he is against abortion under any circumstances; is against same-sex marriage; and, having been equally adamant that he'd never marry a non-Catholic he changed his mind when he met the aristocratic Helena de Chair, sole heiress to an estimated £45-million fortune. Michael Ashcroft's unofficial biography of Rees-Mogg relates that he proposed to her at her mother's home: "'Jacob told me he knew Helena was the right one when he first saw the Van Dyck portrait of Sir Thomas Wentworth, the 1st Earl of Stafford, who is considered an English Catholic martyr, hanging in (her) family picture gallery in Bourne Park,' says his friend Glenys Roberts. 'Jacob told me he dropped to his knees and proposed then and there.'" They married in 2007, have 6-children, and live between 7 Cowley Street in London and Gournay Court.