Parental Influence (in this case on a politician)

Paternal Influence

The influence of a father on his progeny in varies.  I will leave the reader to decide how much influence William Rees-Mogg brought to bear on his son, based on this extract from The Captain – The Life and Times of Simon Raven.   The piece relates to their contemporaneous time at Charterhouse School in the 1940s.

On William:

“Intensely ambitious, prodigiously erudite, deeply reactionary (at the age of fifteen he was seriously advocating slavery as a cure for unemployment), Rees-Mogg also had a sly wit, as Simon discovered towards the end of his second quarter.  In order to test people’s credulity and, if possible, discourage them from the ‘mortal sin’ of onanism, he put it about that masturbation caused syphilis.  Simon was among those taken in, and until a friend disabused him, desisted from a practice he had repeated almost daily since his first, joyous emission the previous October.”