Ignoring the bug is hard for Rees-Mogg because of his curious duality as, on the one hand, a member of Parliament performing a rolling re-enactment of steak-and-kidney-pudding Edwardian Britishness and, on the other, as a practitioner of the most weightless form of global capitalism: he’s a founding partner of Somerset Capital Management, a fund management firm that invests almost all its clients’ money outside Britain. Most of it goes to countries like Russia, India and China, known in the finance world as ‘emerging markets’. It’s almost as if there were two Jacobs: Jacob 1, the unworldly, fusty pedant and amateur historian who calls a bus an omnibus, treats Parliament as his London club and is never happier than when he can spend hours in the Commons debating whether a ‘papist’ like himself (he says he likes the term) may marry an heir to the throne; and his doppelgänger, Jacob 2, master of the spreadsheet and the Bloomberg terminal, able to weigh the comparative merits of a Korean microchip manufacturer and a Russian search engine, at ease with the jargon of the world-bestriding MBA class, shrugging off the opening and closing of factories in this or that country as no more than the fluttering of gills on Mammon’s throat.