LBC has given Jacob Rees-Mogg his own show

Silenced for too long, the cabby’s favourite station has given the Tory MP a regular pulpit to preach from

For too long, the Tory MP has been persona non grata for most broadcasters. Choosing to focus on more moderate figures, the likes of the BBC, ITV and Sky have frozen out the Brexiteer to the extent that, were they forced to report on him, it would not have been surprising had they dubbed over his voice with an actor, like Sinn Fein in the early ’90s.

Sometimes one has had to wait from the end of Westminster Hour on a Sunday night to the following day’s Good Morning Britain to hear the High Tory pontificate on this issues of the day – often bravely, given his very tenuous grasp of them. The poor man was even driven to attempting to throw dead fish into the Thames in a bid to muster any media attention.

So thank goodness radio station LBC yesterday broke with the broadcast boycott of the Somerset MP and announced he was being given his own fortnightly phone-in show.

And… yes, it’s sarcasm and it’s the lowest form of wit but sometimes that’s what an announcement like this drives one to.

He will take calls for 30 minutes during Nick Ferrari’s breakfast show, “with no topic off limits”, the station said, following in the footsteps of his fellow Brexiteering media wallflowers Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson.

Farage was given his own show proper last January, which he still hosts. (Other previous phone-in hosts include Nick Clegg and Ken Livingstone, whose show was dropped in 2016 after he claimed that Adolf Hitler supported Zionism).

But with Rees-Mogg in particular – he’s everywhere, isn’t he? He’s on the Today programme when you tune in first thing in the morning because absolutely no other pro-Brexit MPs are available, except when he isn’t because he’s on the Good Morning Britain sofa showing the hoi polloi he’s a charming old toff and absolutely not an abortion-obsessed lunatic.

He’s on Sky News so much throughout the day he may as well have his own parking spot in Isleworth, apart from lunchtimes when he’s on The World At One. He’s on the Daily Politics and the Sunday Politics and probably the Saturday Politics if there was one and Marr and Peston and Niall Paterson.

He’s in the Sun and the Telegraph and the Mail and the Express and possibly Farmers Machinery Journal for all I know. He’s got a podcast and Twitter and an Instagram account which is on the face of it self-deprecating while simultaneously clearly not.

Where does this end? A news channel rebranding and featuring him exclusively, as Sky Arts did bewilderingly for a while for the violinist André Rieu? Will we be walking through Piccadilly Circus only to be accosted by a giant holographic version of him, like the advert for Jaws 19 in Back To The Future 2? Are we all destined to dream of him every night?

It seems we are destined to live in Jacob Rees-Mogg’s world. Fortunately, there is no recent precedent of a once widely-ridiculed outrider using mastery of the media to ensure that, once his party’s leadership was available, his was already the dominant discourse and thus an unlikely winner.

Is there?