punditry as a solitary vice

Speaking of gobshites Lord Rees-Mogg dies. From earlier, his memoirs are reviewed:

Nor am I wholly convinced that Rees-Mogg is quite the harmless old buffer of his own self-portrait. In one of his entertaining memoirs, Simon Raven describes the panic Rees-Mogg created at Charterhouse when he spread the rumour that masturbation caused syphilis in a priggish attempt to stamp out solitary vice. 

And when it occured to him that these people will believe anything, his course was set.

Comments

[Chris Brooke]

This was the Rees-Mogg Times's comment on the Pinochet coup (13 September 1973):

"Whether or not the armed forces were right to do what they have done, the circumstances were such that a reasonable military man could in good faith have thought it his constitutional duty to intervene."

[johnf]

His family were Somerset coal owners.

In the syndicalist strikes before the First War a group of striking miners approached the family pile. A young member of the family (too early for our Rees Mogg) lent out of an upper floor window and shot a miner, wounding him. The magistrate let the young man off.

[JamesP]

In ALMS FOR OBLIVION, Raven's novel sequence, the Rees-Mogg equivalent ends up killing himself after being confronted with the bleak, monstrous consequences of his own petty evils. Fun stuff!