General Election 2024: Jacob Rees-Mogg on why Reform voters should vote for him

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg has said Reform voters will get “90 per cent of what they want” if they vote for him instead. The battle for North East Somerset and Hanham — the constituency replacing North East Somerset which Sir Jacob has held for the Conservatives since 2010 — is set to be hard-fought.

Polls have suggested that Labour could win the seat back and their candidate is the man Sir Jacob unseated 14 years ago, the now West of England Metro Mayor Dan Norris. Speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service as he campaigns as the Conservative candidate for the seat, Sir Jacob said: “Being a member of Parliament is a leasehold not a freehold. You earn people’s votes at every election and you must not take it for granted.

“I have always taken that view, regardless of where the opinion polls have been, that I must get out and knock on as many doors and deliver as many leaflets as possible.”

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At this election, a key worry for Conservative candidates is losing votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform. Asked by the Local Democracy Reporting Service, what he would say to people considering voting Reform on July 4, Sir Jacob said: “If they are in North East Somerset and Hanham, if they are thinking of voting Reform, they might as well vote for me because Nigel Farage himself said he thinks both of us should be in the same party.”

He added: “I agree with that — I think he should be in the Conservative Party; he thinks I should be in Reform. But our views on a whole range of issues are very similar.

“So if they vote for me, Reform voters will get 90% of what they want and they have a chance of electing an MP — when Reform on its own is, I would say, a very long shot in this constituency.”

It is a constituency which looks very different to the previous North East Somerset constituency, losing much of the eastern side of it to Bath and to Frome and East Somerset, and gaining Hanham from across the Avon in South Gloucestershire. Sir Jacob said: “I have got some friends who live in Hanham long before the boundary changes were proposed.”

He added: “It’s new but nonetheless it's not as if I’ve got the Outer Hebrides suddenly coming into the constituency. It's very important to ensure, with the new boundaries, that people in the whole area are properly represented by the next MP and that’s certainly what I would be aiming to do.”

He said: “The most important work of an MP locally is in supporting constituents when they come to constituency surgeries and that is in helping people when part of the state bureaucracy has failed them.”

As North East Somerset MP, he said he had helped tackle issues such as intervening to get people their passports in time for their holidays, and helping with housing issues. He said: “I have found that working with Curo when people have had complaints has been very helpful to my constituents. Curo has tended to be very responsive and that’s really important because these are things that help people in their daily lives.”

He said: “This isn’t changing the world but it is making people’s lives better.”

On one occasion, he said he had helped an EU national living in North East Somerset prove to her home country that she existed so she could claim her pension. He said: “I have always taken the view that anyone who lives in the constituency is entitled to representation. I don’t check they have the right to vote in national elections.”

If an asylum seeker living in North East Somerset and Hanham faced being deported to Rwanda under the scheme planned in the Conservative manifesto, could they go to Sir Jacob as their MP for help? He said it was an MP’s responsibility to help redress grievances when something had gone wrong.

He said: “If the person could show they had a justified fear of persecution in the county they were going to be sent to, then that would be something for an MP to involve himself in. If, on the other hand, the person was subject to the normal course of the law, MPs don’t interfere in the justice system — indeed we are specifically prohibited from doing so.”

The achievement he is proudest of is working with a group of MPs to make available an expensive drug that stops the progress of Batten disease, a “horrible” disease in children which, if untreated, has a life expectancy in the low teens.

He said: “There is a child living in the constituency who has this disease whose disease has now been frozen for five years. And of all the things I have done in my political career, I think that one thing is the most important because this now young man has a chance of a much fuller life than without this drug would have been possible.

“I worked with other MPs, it wasn’t solely down to me. But I used every parliamentary mechanism to raise awareness of it and to persuade the government and most importantly NHS England that it had to fund this drug.

“It’s things like that that are most important as a local MP: helping your constituents through surgeries, through correspondence on a day to day basis with the issues that affect their lives.”

Meanwhile on a national level, Sir Jacob said: “I think the most important thing I have been involved with is inevitably Brexit. That has given people back democratic control over their lives and there are issues in this election which we would not be able to debate, we would not be able to change if we were still members of the European Union — one of them, as it happens, being Labour’s desire to put VAT on school fees.”

He also said he had worked to tackle the cost of living. He said: “In my brief period as energy secretary, I passed possibly the potentially most expensive act of Parliament that has come before the house: to protect people’s energy bills.

“And why did we do that? We did that because we were so conscious of the cost of living problem people were facing.”

He said: “I think the Conservatives fully understand the impact of price rises. They understand it both in terms of how it affects their constituents because of the meetings they have with them, the surgeries, and so on.

“But they also understand it on an economic level: on the damage that inflation does to the overall economy and the reduction in growth it creates which makes all of the economic activity that you need harder.”

Commenting more on his suggestion that fellow Brexiteer, Mr Farage, should be in the Conservative Party, Sir Jacob said: “I think Nigel is by temper and nature and policy a conservative and that his views are entirely compatible with membership of the Conservative Party. Inevitably, within any party there is a coalition and a range of views but I think that Nigel’s fit in with the Tory party and that the wings of politics need to be united otherwise fighting elections is very difficult.”

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Did Mr Farage’s recent comments that Rishi Sunak did not understand “our culture” by leaving the D-Day commemorations — which Mr Farage said later had referred to the Prime Minister’s “class” and “privilege” — give him cause for concern about the idea of welcoming the Reform UK leader into the Conservative Party?

Sir Jacob said: “I am not in favour of class warfare whether it's coming from the Labour Party or it's coming from Nigel Farage. But in all parties people say things that you would not necessarily say yourself. That is part of politics.”

He said he was “strongly of the belief we need to reunite the Tory family,” but he added: “Nothing’s going to happen before the general election.”

The full list of candidates standing for the North East Somerset and Hanham constituency is:

• Barmy Brunch (Monster Raving Loony Party)

• Edmund Cannon (Green)

• Nicholas Hales (Independent)

• Paul MacDonnell (Reform UK)

• Dan Norris (Labour)

• Jacob Rees-Mogg (Conservative)

• Dine Romero (Liberal Democrat)