Jacob Rees Mogg’s comments on the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which he made on LBC on 5th November, have rightly caused outrage and he has apologised. Whether an apology is sufficient is another matter.
Mr Rees Mogg apparently thought that the residents of Grenfell did not use their ‘common sense’. There is no need to dwell on that point, indeed to do so simply raises appalling issues.
However the wider issue of Rees Mogg and what he thinks ‘common sense’ is, is of interest.
According to Raymond Williams in Keywords, common sense amounts to a ‘blunt assertion of the obvious- what everybody knows or knows to be practical’.
But what an Old Etonian thinks every one knows or should know might not be the same as what the ‘common’ person (as Rees Mogg would no doubt see them in another usage of the term) see it as.
Interestingly in his book The Victorians (2019) Rees Mogg also makes reference to common sense.
For example he writes of the Victorian radical and soldier General Napier, ‘His views in many cases are not especially radical at all but are simply common sense’.
Elsewhere Rees Mogg quotes Adam Smith ‘it is the maxim of every prudent master of a family never to attempt to make at home what it will cost him more to make than buy’. Rees Mogg adds that for Lord Palmerston this was ‘mere common sense’
In short Rees Mogg seems to use the term to mean the ‘obvious’ Perhaps he should try waking up in a burning building in the middle of the night…
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