He has pretty well everything that a budding statesman could wish for.

He’s got a devoted heiress wife, a brood of six children, a place in the country as well as a splendid town house in Westminster, and a fortune of tens of millions of pounds, thanks to the immense success of the financial advisory company he founded.

Everything, that is, except for a seat in Parliament...

But I can disclose that Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg – booted out by his constituents in 2024 – has been elected to an infinitely more exclusive body than the mewling pit of half-wits that constitutes the House of Commons.

‘He’s got into The XV,’ an admirer tells me, hurriedly explaining that that’s a reference not to any kind of rugby team – an improbable destination for the beanpole Sir Jacob, who memorably described himself as ‘a complete weed’ – but to a very different band of brothers.

‘It’s the Catholic mafia,’ Sir Jacob’s fan adds playfully. ‘A very, very discreet dining club for Roman Catholics. Membership is by invitation only, of course.’

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, Conservative politician, businessman and broadcaster and former MP

Membership, I’m told, is restricted to only the most eminent of Catholics, generally drawn from a handful of families, such as the Fitzalan-Howards – dukes of Norfolk.

The current duke, who in his hereditary role as Earl Marshal organised and orchestrated the King’s Coronation, declines to discuss the club, though I’m assured that he is ‘the key figure’.

His silence is matched by the usually eloquent Sir Jacob, 56. Asked if his late father, Lord Rees-Mogg, was also a member of The XV, he declines to comment.

But it was undoubtedly his father whose doctrinal example Sir Jacob has done his utmost to emulate, ‘[reading] the catechism to his children over lunch every Sunday as a way of passing on to them the teachings of the Church’, as Michael Ashcroft recorded in his biography of Sir Jacob.

Lord Ashcroft added that the former MP has even had a private chapel built at his house in Somerset, where Catholic Mass is held occasionally.

But I’m assured that conviviality defines The XV almost as much as Catholicism. Its dinners – black-tie affairs – are held at White’s, the gentlemen’s club in St James’s, which remains resolutely an all-male bastion. It’s familiar territory for Sir Jacob. ‘He was lunching there before Christmas,’ a member of White’s tells me.

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