The Story at a glance
- Jacob Rees-Mogg pocketed £16,800 in severance pay for his time in Liz Truss’s government
- The former Business Secretary was in the role for seven weeks
- Critics are calling Rees-Mogg a ‘hypocrite’ for taking the compensation after he argued civil servants should have their redundancy money slashed
- He now pockets more than £750 an hour as a presenter on GB News and £80k MPs salary
- He was entitled to claim three months’ salary on leaving government when Liz Truss quit as PM
Yes … we’re really paying Jacob Rees-Mogg £17k compensation – the hypocrite who called for paycuts
Jacob Rees-Mogg has bagged £16,800 in compensation for his short seven weeks of work in Liz Truss’s government.
The news is shocking. If Rees-Mogg gets £17k for seven weeks of Liz Truss hell, what should the rest of us get?
Rees-Mogg was one of Truss’s vocal supporters and played a key role in helping Truss get elected to No 10.
- Liz Truss has written a book about her catastrophic 49 days in office
- Three Billionaires control most of British media – future looks bleak
He is also the former Brexit minister who campaigned hard for the UK to leave the EU … mostly because he was going to pocket millions from it via his investment company Somerset Capital Management.
It hardly seems fair that Rees-Mogg, who was a key part of the economy-killing Truss government, gets to a payout.
The Independent writes:
“Compared to the billions made by the managers of all the hedge funds who told Kwasi Kwarteng what a great job he was doing while simultaneously betting on everything going spectacularly wrong, 17 grand is nothing.”
But let’s not forget about his hedge fund, which paid him a £500k dividend three months after he got the sack.
Before his seven weeks as business secretary, Rees-Mogg held a ‘newly created’ role in the cabinet as “minister for Brexit opportunities and government efficiency”. (It helps to get the PM elected, you get nonsense made-up roles in government).
On the ‘Brexit opportunities’ front, he found the UK might be able to buy more powerful vacuums from South Korea.
On the ‘government efficiency’ front he unveiled plans to cut the amount of redundancy pay for departing civil servants by a quarter – from four weeks’ salary per year of service to three. A consultancy document produced under his direction said changes to redundancy payments would “create significant savings on the current cost of exits”.
It’s almost laughable.
Did he even consider a pay cut for himself?
A Labour source said: “It is hard to know who is the bigger hypocrite for accepting these handouts: Jacob Rees-Mogg, who said the severance pay of civil servants was too generous; or Greg Hands, who is constantly preaching that the Tories are the party of sound money. They are both as bad as each other, and they deserve a permanent redundancy notice from the British people.”
With the next general election just around the corner, we can only hope that Rees-Mogg will step down and British politics can be free of his rancid hypocrisy.