Jacob Rees-Mogg comes out to welcome Class War as they arrive to protest
I published the true story about Class War’s protest outside the Westminster home of Jacob Rees-Mogg on Facebook the morning after the event (and in picture captions hours after it happened), when the newspapers and TV were up in arms about a story they had invented about an “ambush” based on a largely irrational over-reaction to a dramatic short video taken and posted by Class War.
Starring Adam Clifford as Jacob Rees-Mogg
Both Class War and Rees-Mogg were I think delighted by the outcome, which provided an incredible amount of free publicity for both. I was upset because it showed a total failure of objective journalism in the UK. Not by the two journalists who were actually present at the the event – myself and another photographer who came along as it started (two other photographers arrived as it was finishing) but by those who fulminated on it without making any checks or inquiries as to what actually happened. Although I’d posted about it with the pictures I filed later in the evening, and the following morning on Facebook, my account was never used by the media and I was never interviewed. The media had made up their story and didn’t want to know what actually happened. And as Class War’s Ian Bone got bleeped out and insulted for telling Nick Ferrari on air, it was “total bollocks“.
and Jane Nicholl as Nanny Crook
I was there because, like the Rees-Moggs, I had read about it in advance on Facebook, where it had been fairly widely posted in advance. I don’t expect the Rees-Moggs read the various groups on which it was posted but clearly the police and others do, and had informed them, and Jacob Rees-Mogg had decided to miss a meeting of Brexiteers to play his role in the event, along with his family and Nanny Crook. He could of course simply have taken his family and nanny out of the house for the evening to avoid the protest, and I’d rather assumed he would, or that they would simply stay inside the house and ignore it. But he or his advisers were rather cleverer than I’d expected.
The family and Nanny came out to join in
Having decided to cover the event I told Class War and was invited to join them at the pub where they were meeting before going to the Rees-Mogg home, where two of the small group put on costumes for it, as Rees-Mogg and as Nanny Crook. A third activist was carrying a costume as a giant inflatable penis, but she didn’t start putting it on until the protest had started and missed most of it.
The boys didn’t want to miss the performance though adults pulled the blinds
It was a short protest, and I’ve written about it at some length in Class War visit the Rees-Moggs on My London Diary where you can read what actually happened.
At the end I went back to the pub with Class War, and watched the video one of them had posted with them, before going back home to file my pictures and story a couple of hours after the event. It was the video that made the story sensational – and it only showed a little of the event. And the media totally failed to ask the kind of questions every journalist should have asked.
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