Jacob Rees-Mogg and Leo Varadkar: two shockers

What do you think of Jacob Rees-Mogg? Yes, I used to think that way about him too – like he’d escaped from the pages of a comic, where he’d been Lord Snooty’s right-hand-man. A Tory, but basically harmless. I mean, how could you feel anything but amusement at someone who called the sixth of his children ‘Sixtus’?

Silly me. Rees-Mogg was on the BBC’s Question Time last week, and the amiable poodle turned into a vicious attack-dog.  The programme came from Somerset, which  Rees-Mogg represents. Not surprisingly, the topic of Gaza came up. One panellist called it “collective punishment”,  which I thought was a mild term for the sustained killing of men, women, children, babies; the withholding of food, water, electricity, medicine; and the refusal to stop doing this, even when urged to do so by the UN.

Then Rees-Mogg was asked his view.  He rejected the term ‘collective punishment’ and dwelt on the Hamas attack which led to 1200 Israelis being killed.  Rees-Mogg said this kind of barbarity had to be resisted, Israel had to react and defend itself. “What do you think we in Britain would have done, if the same act of terrorism had been perpetrated?”  He probably got that bit right, but then the British armed forces have never been models of restraint.  But I thought Rees-Mogg,   the aristocratic Catholic,  would have been able to identify ethnic cleansing when he saw it, and then speak the truth. Alas, au contraire.

And today, another politician that I’ve tended to think of as sort of cuddly appeared on TV and showed me what a poor judge of character I am.  Leo Varadkar was on RTÉ’s ‘The Week in Politics’  and he was asked about the Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald saying that her party would be quite willing to take on the role of Minister for Justice, if the votes permitted it. So what did Leo think of that?

“I find the idea of Sinn Féin taking over the Justice portfolio, or the Foreign Affairs portfolio, or the Defence portfolio, repugnant.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him properly so I scrolled the TV back a couple of minutes. Yep, that was indeed the word he’d used of Sinn Féin in Justice, Foreign Affairs or Defence –  repugnant.  Why? Because they refuse to condemn “war crimes” in the North.  So never mind what the electorate may decide,  Leo is in  repugnant mode. Unfortunately, he wasn’t asked how he could look at the war crimes being perpetrated in Gaza and not call them what they are. The best he could manage – admittedly more than Micheál Martin – was “beginning to look like revenge”.

There are few things as painful as to discover a politician- in this case two politicians – can play the I’m-Mr-Nice-Honest-I-Am card  and like eejits people – OK, Virginia, me, ME – believe them.