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Mogg Asset Fund

Somerset Capital Management, the boutique founded by Jacob Rees-Mogg, is launching one of the UK’s first global emerging market income funds next week. The Emerging Dividend Growth fund is offering a 4.6 per cent yield at first, with manager Edward Lam saying many of his stocks could double their pay-outs within five or six years. Mr Lam, a former Asia and global emerging market analyst from Lloyd George Management, will run a concentrated 40-stock portfolio and said he would cap assets under management at roughly $2bn (£1.3bn). He said: “What you have found over the last two years is that emerging company income has been more reliable than it has been in developed markets.” Emerging nations are focusing on dividends as a way of funding retirement, with South Africa, Chile, Brazil and China leading the way, while India, Russia and South Korea still lag behind, he said. ”The MSCI emerging index is heavily weighted to cyclicals, but we are focused on utilities, telecoms and consumer staples, which are able to pay out a very steady dividend,” he added. The manager favours stocks like China Mobile and Egyptian mobile operator Mobinil. The fund opens on March 1 with a £2,000 minimum investment for retail investors. It carries a 1.5 per cent annual charge and a 10 per cent performance fee on any absolute returns of more than 5 per cent. Somerset was founded by Mr Rees-Mogg when he and his former emerging markets team at Lloyd George defected from the group in 2007. Before launching his fund management career, Mr Rees-Mogg, son of former Times editor William Rees-Mogg, was a Tory politician who, in 1997, famously canvassed the Labour heartland of Central Fife in a Bentley.

A book by one of the grandest names in British journalism that sheds new light on Rupert Murdoch’s empire must – this month – command attention. “Looking back,” writes William Rees-Mogg in his Memoirs, “he has been an excellent proprietor for The Times, but also for Fleet Street.” It seemed like a judgment from another age this week when Murdoch, appearing before the House of Commons select committee to face questions on phone hacking at the News of the World, fell back on what his Scots ancestors would have recognised as the sinner’s agonised cry from Hell: “Oh Lord, Lord, I didnae ken!” To which the divine reply could only be: “Weel, ye ken noo!” Lord Rees-Mogg, like the rest of us, did not know the extent of the intrusions into private lives undertaken by News International – the UK newspaper subsidiary of Murdoch’s News Corporation – and about which no one in authority in the newspapers or the company had, by their account, the least inkling. Well, he knows now. He might, had he words enough and time, have added a judicious balancing sentence. But probably no more. His high opinion of Murdoch derives from his time as editor of The Times from 1967-1981, which culminated with the Australian’s acquisition of that newspaper and the Sunday Times from the Canadian Thomson group. As he writes, Murdoch – by smashing the power of print unions that had escaped the control not just of management but of their own officers – helped secure a future for an industry that might have been much grimmer and more impoverished. Rees-Mogg’s journalistic apprenticeship was served on this newspaper in the 1950s. He secured a meeting with the editor, Sir Gordon Newton, because Shirley, now Baroness, Williams had written a profile of him in an Oxford student paper when he was president of the union, which had him reading the FT at breakfast. For an editor scouting for the cream of Oxbridge, he was a natural choice. He experienced it as “a nest of singing birds” (a phrase of Dr Johnson’s) and (following David Kynaston in his centenary history of the paper) “rather like a university extension course in which the trainees learnt far more than they had at university”. While a leader and feature writer on the FT, he wrote speeches for the then prime minister Anthony Eden. He remained an active, engaged Conservative, privy to some of the party’s inner counsels, through a period at The Sunday Times, only taking greater distance when ascending to The Times’ editorial chair. His loyalty was consistent but not his views: he had been a Keynesian but was persuaded into monetarism by Peter Jay, The Times’ economic editor (who did the same for the upper reaches of the Labour party); and he became a eurosceptic, which cost him the respect, he believes, of Edward Heath. Both of these shifts were common among moderates in the Tory party. His 30-year career after editing The Times has seen him remain a graceful, often acute, sometimes reactionary columnist, and has brought a succession of jobs – chairman of the Arts Council, deputy chairman of the BBC board of governors – at the core of greatness and goodness. He found BBC culture rebarbative and deeply upset the executives when he was instrumental in temporarily banning – at prompting from the government – a documentary on the IRA commander Martin McGuinness that neglected to put to him the allegation that he had ordered many murders. I thought him wrong then, right now. Memoirs is a life recollected in the determined tranquillity of his 83rd year. His contentment is solidly based on a family, upper middle class, rich enough during his high journalistic period for a mansion in Somerset and a Georgian townhouse in London, which remains close and united; and a religion, Catholicism, which appears to give meaning and hope, and provide the springs of love. From an early age, England’s literature – especially Shakespeare and Alexander Pope – gave structure to his thought and expressed his moral outlook. Shakespeare, he assumes, was a Catholic (there is no certainty); and Pope he prefers to John Milton because the latter was a revolutionary leveller, the former an acerbic conservative, seeing Man (“the proper study of Mankind”) as “in doubt to deem himself as God, or beast”. The book is largely purged of bile; all criticisms are oblique. When relating how he was refused a scholarship entry to Eton – a source of lasting regret – he claims it was due to the intervention of the school’s then provost, Lord Quickswood, who had objected to Rees-Mogg’s Catholicism. Levelly, he writes that “no provost was ever again invited to join in the scholarship proceedings. No Roman Catholic was ever barred again.” There is no denunciation of prejudice; instead, an implicit reassertion of British fair play belatedly arrived at. Even his self-criticisms are mild. Rees-Mogg confesses to being a bit of a Polonius at times and making bad editorial calls but, overall, there are few regrets.

Obit rees mogg

William Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times, was a journalist to the end, having written his final column for the paper two weeks ago at the age of 84. A man of trenchant views, he was never far from the headlines whether as a result of his own newspaper articles, as a peer in the House of Lords or as chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council. In 1964 he wrote a now famous article in the Sunday Times entitled “A Captain’s Innings”, calling for Alec Douglas-Home to resign as prime minister. The article, regarded as a highly influential piece of postwar journalism, was followed shortly by Mr Douglas-Home’s resignation, although the Tory politician later said he had already decided to step down. Never afraid to speak out, in his broadcasting post he attacked Coronation Street, the ITV soap opera, calling it a relic of the Harold Macmillan era that bore little resemblance to modern society because of its lack of ethnic minorities. Educated at Charterhouse School and Balliol College, Oxford, he started his journalistic career in 1952 at the Financial Times, working for eight years there in several roles, including chief leader writer and assistant editor. In 1960 he moved to the Sunday Times, rising to deputy editor, before becoming editor of its sister title The Times in 1967. In the same year, he wrote one of his most controversial pieces for the paper. In an editorial entitled “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?”, he defended Mick Jagger following the arrest of the Rolling Stones singer for possessing drugs. He was seen as a pioneering editor who pushed investigative journalism and more strident opinions in Times leaders and columns. He was editor during the strike of 1978–1979, an 11-month period when the paper went unpublished. An authoritative figure during his reign, his tenure came to an abrupt end in 1981 following Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of The Times and the Sunday Times. Rees-Mogg had led a group of journalists opposed to the acquisition. But he made his peace with Mr Murdoch who, in tribute, described him as having “retained the intellectual integrity of the paper while attracting a broader-based and markedly more female readership.” He was knighted in 1981, and made a life peer in 1988. His views continued to be closely watched by his media peers. While John Major was prime minister, Rees-Mogg wrote an article in The Times, widely followed by other newspapers, which described Mr Major as “unfit to govern and lacking self-confidence”. The piece was attacked by Sir Norman Fowler, then the Tory party chairman, as “the authentic voice of the Patrician Tendency – pure snobbery’’. Rees-Mogg was a director of GEC from 1981 to 1997 and a director of fund manager M&G from 1987 to 1994. He is survived by his wife Gillian and five children. His son Jacob Rees-Mogg , Conservative MP for northeast Somerset, said his father had worked until the end. Speaking to The Times, he said: “I had the greatest father anyone could ever want . . . He had the most extraordinary knowledge of almost every subject you could ever ask him about, and had this fascinating position in British public life for the last 60 years. He interviewed the leader of the opposition only six weeks ago, and had been a speech writer for Anthony Eden.”

MOGG MAJOR

There has never been anyone like Jacob Rees-Mogg — apart from, arguably, his father. Twenty-five years before the Conservative Eurosceptic MP was defying UK prime minister Theresa May over her negotiations with Brussels, Mr Rees-Mogg’s father, William, was trying to do the same to then-prime minister John Major. In July 1993, William Rees-Mogg launched a legal action to prevent the UK from ratifying the Maastricht treaty, which effectively created the modern EU. Declassified documents have revealed the delight of Sir John when Lord Rees-Mogg’s judicial review failed. “A full gloat is meritted [sic],” the then-prime minister wrote on hearing the news. He does not wish to provoke the Rees Mogg brigade into a further Quixotic action, if there is a chance that they will now abandon their expensive and ultimately pointless exercise Memo to John Major about foreign secretary Douglas Hurd Lord Rees-Mogg, who died in 2012, was a former editor of the Times newspaper. He had started out as an EU enthusiast, but turned Eurosceptic after becoming alarmed by what he saw as the loss of national sovereignty and the lack of British influence in Brussels. He described his 1993 legal action as the most important constitutional case for 300 years — a claim that the judges in the case described as “an exaggeration”. The younger Mr Rees-Mogg has continued his father’s fight against Brussels, and made even greater historical claims than his father, calling Mrs May’s recent white paper on Brexit “the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Phillip II at Le Goulet in 1200”. Like his father, Mr Rees-Mogg has enlisted a barrister to mount arguments against the government’s European policy. But unlike his father, he is fighting his battle in the court of public opinion and in parliament. Earlier this month, he secured an amendment to the customs bill preventing the UK from collecting VAT on behalf of the EU after Brexit, unless the EU does the same. “Who is running Britain? Is it the prime minister, or is it [Mr Rees-Mogg]?” the pro-EU Conservative MP Anna Soubry asked in parliament last week. Lord Rees-Mogg’s legal action was the last obstacle to the UK ratifying the Maastricht treaty. Even then, the Major government was wary of antagonising him. “The foreign secretary [Douglas Hurd] is exercising restraint in public comment for the time being,” read one memo to the prime minister. “He does not wish to provoke the Rees Mogg [sic] brigade into a further Quixotic action, if there is a chance that they will now abandon their expensive and ultimately pointless exercise.” Meanwhile, Mr Rees-Mogg was already appearing in the media on behalf of his father, aged 24. “This is one step in what may be a long path or may not be,” he told the Evening Standard about the court defeat. “We’ll have to wait and see.”