THE INDIVIDUALIST

Since becoming a Member of Parliament in 2010, Rees-Mogg has emerged, as Michael Ashcroft puts it in his well-researched biography, as "one of the best-known public figures, not just one of the highest-profile politicians, in Britain." Since 2016, Rees-Mogg has emerged as a semi-official leader for those Conservative MPs who want the sharpest possible break with the E.U. But his popularity, the phenomenon known as "Moggmania," owes less to Rees-Mogg's politics than to his character: his eccentricities, his obvious love of the English language, his adherence to his principles, and his faith in human decency. Since the Conservatives took office in 2010, they have introduced same-sex marriage; reformed the welfare system to take away incentives for marriage, and to penalize poorer couples who have more than two children; smoothed the path to divorce; and used money and power abroad to support gay marriage and abortion. Hollis represented a strain of anti-capitalist English Catholicism which peaked in the first half of the twentieth century. [...]G. K. Chesterton argued that "what destroyed the Family in the modern world was