Voices: Rishi Sunak has already done one thing right – getting rid of Jacob Rees-Mogg

So farewell, then, Jacob Rees-Mogg, haunted Victorian pencil and one of the most arrogant and unpleasant figures ever to sit around a British cabinet table – an extremely crowded field. He resigned from the government just before he was going to be sacked by Rishi Sunak.

If Sunak does nothing else of note or merit in his career, he deserves the abiding gratitude of a nation for being rid of this absurd poseur.

Perhaps Rees-Mogg couldn’t contemplate someone such as Sunak, who only went to Winchester College, disposing of an Old Etonian such as himself, but at any rate, the joke is over.

He was never a very likely recruit for Project Sunak, and he knew it. Sunak is the geeky, ex-business school guy, never happier than when engrossed in a multi-dimensional spreadsheet, concatenating numbers and charting trends on a log scale. Rees-Mogg revelled in his affected fogeyness, and was proud that he never had as much as an iPad on his desk. Not only was Rees-Mogg’s dress sense self-consciously old-fashioned – harmless enough – but so was his approach to his duties, which is less amusing.

He took pride in the way that paper was preferred to email, and he fussed about questions of style and etiquette. The secretary of state for business, energy and industrial strategy knew nothing of business, hadn’t much energy and believed in free markets not dirigiste “strategy”. He knew plenty about portfolio investment based in tax havens, but that’s not the same thing at all.

He was put in charge of finding Brexit opportunities by Truss, to protect her against claims she wasn’t trying hard enough to “unleash” them. His big idea was to restore imperial measurements, such as the inch, stone and pint; it was not immediately obvious to Sunak how that would boost exports.

Besides, Rees-Mogg had thrown a few of his casual insults at Sunak – belying his gentlemanly image – including calling Sunak a “socialist”. He’d gambled on backing Boris last week, but on the very morn of his execution he underwent a death row conversion to the Sunakian cause, and retracted his claim that Sunak was some sort of Bolshevik. Rees-Mogg condescended to offer his talents to the new prime minister. Sunak can see through a phoney better than most.

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Rees-Mogg likes to pass himself off as a toff, but he’s not landed gentry, and the family is more nouveau riche. His dad was William, editor of The Times in the 1980s, a nice man who sadly had to abase himself to Rupert Murdoch, but nonetheless retained a solidly One Nation and pro-European outlook on life and politics. His son is a much less impressive chip off the block.

The “member for the 18th century” was an ornament in the Commons, and well suited to his role as Eurosceptic crank, albeit one with a quite vindictive streak of disloyalty. It was liberally deployed against Theresa May, who he plotted against incessantly with the European Research Group. He helped Boris Johnson into power, and Johnson gave Rees-Mogg a harmless job as leader of the Commons and lord president of the council when he needed to “get Brexit done”, rightly judging that Jacob’s delight in the glories and perks of these ancient offices would stop him from causing trouble.

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Like Johnson, Rees-Mogg happily sold out Northern Ireland in a Brexit arrangement they had both once vowed to fight to the death. After 2019 and the ratification of the EU-UK deal, Johnson sacked most of the Eurosceptic useful idiots such as Andrea Leadsom, but kept Rees-Mogg on. It looked very much like a private joke on Johnson’s part, simply because he knew how much Rees-Mogg wound up the opposition.

Rees-Mogg so loved to poke his cane into the most sensitive of social wounds, didn’t he? To him, the increase in the number of food banks since 2010 is something to be proud of, a testament to the generosity of the British people. Rees-Mogg also enraged opposition MPs by languishing almost horizontal on the green benches of the chamber, like an Edwardian Spy cartoon, and Johnson enjoyed his antique antics. Johnson also needed some loyal allies on his side. Being a fellow Old Etonian also probably helped.

Anyway, this elegant anachronism is returning to the backbenches and, very likely, will be ejected from parliament at the next election by some Liberal Democrat oik. We will be seeing much less of Rees-Mogg and his double-breasted suits, his Bentley and his nanny, and hearing less of his cultivated drawl. His time has passed, at last.