Just days ago it looked as though Moggmentum would be the new political catchphrase de nos jours, as Jacob Rees-Mogg’s younger sister, Annunziata, was unveiled as the glamorous face of Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party for the European elections.
Now, before a leaflet has even been delivered, the opposing Change UK party – set up by The Independent Group of MPs – has hit back with their own alluring candidate: Boris Johnson’s little sister Rachel.
And what makes it all so intriguing is that the two women now on the front line of the great Brexit divide are taking on their better-known siblings.
So who’s who when it comes to the Moggs versus the Johnsons and what are the similarities and differences between these two rival political dynasties?
Rachel Johnson: A member of the Conservative Party from 2008 to 2011, she very publicly switched to the Lib Dems in the run-up to the 2017 general election
Annunziata Rees-Mogg was selected as the Tory parliamentary candidate for Somerton and Frome in Somerset, but failed to take the seat from the Lib Dems in 2010
IS IT IN THE GENES?
RACHEL JOHNSON, 53: One of four children of the broadcaster, writer, environmentalist and former Tory MEP Stanley, 78, and his first wife, artist Charlotte Johnson-Wahl. Political siblings: Boris, 54, a long and chequered career (and love life) as a journalist, politician and some-time presenter of Have I Got News For You, he’s an arch-Brexiteer and favourite to replace Theresa May as leader of the Tory Party. Jo, 47, the youngest and widely regarded as the brightest of the Johnson clan, a banker turned journalist and then politician. Like his father, he is a Europhile through and through who supports the campaign for a ‘people’s vote’. Johnson has three children with writer Ivo Dawnay whom she married in 1992. They live in Notting Hill and an Exmoor farmhouse.
Annunziata Rees-Mogg, 40: One of five children of Lord Rees-Mogg, a former editor of The Times who was described as a pillar of the Establishment ‘virtually from cradle to grave’, and his wife Gillian Morris. Political siblings: Jacob, 49, a successful hedge funder before he became Tory MP for North East Somerset in 2010, he inherited his unashamed Euroscepticism from his father and is the dominant figure in the European Research Group of hard-core Brexiteer MPs. Annunziata has a daughter with ex-Army officer Matthew Glanville whom she married in 2010, and lives in Lincolnshire.
THE NANNY FACTOR
Johnson: Growing up in Brussels where Stanley was working as a civil servant, the Johnsons employed Norland nanny Mary Kidd. Recalling the first time she washed Boris’s hair, she said: ‘He had his pants on in the bath, because he was embarrassed, so I simply allowed him to see me in the bath covered with bubbles. Next time I washed his hair he didn’t have his pants on.’ A 6ft chain smoker with a rasping voice, she became a second mother to the children after their mother became ill.
REES-MOGG: Veronica Crook, 77, has been part of the Rees-Mogg family for half a century. After helping raise the Rees-Mogg children, she moved to Hong Kong with Jacob when he began his business career in 1994. She came out of retirement when he started his own family and was back
