“The approach taken today is the most unconstitutional use of this House since the days of Charles Stewart Parnell when he tried to bung up Parliament,” said the harangued and haggard Rees-Mogg last week as he continued to fight the government’s losing battle. It should also be noted that for a man whose use of language is so well-fabled, he pronounced ‘Parnell’ wrongly. PAR – NELL as opposed Parnell, in the same manner as ‘O’Connell’.

This was the second time in recent years that the memory of Parnell had been invoked at the Palace of Westminster. In 2015, after the SNP landslide of Scottish seats the new members were pleased to find that a bust of Parnell had been placed inside their whips’ office.  Whichever parliamentary joker was held responsible for statue placement, one assumes that they had a greater recall of Irish history than does the Leader of the House.

The latest work by Michael Ashcroft, a biography of Rees-Mogg, seems largely to be a vapid exercise in that most vapid fields of celebrity culture, as excerpts published in the Daily Mail paint it as a glorified glossy magazine which tells the sagas of the man’s love life. Answering a question which no one had asked, and, the images that are induced, all could have done without. Yet said factoids, when taken in small measure, can be used rather effectively to illustrate the political thinking and motivations of the prominent Conservative.

Ashcroft quotes a university friend of Rees-Mogg’s who stayed with him while he was walking for Lloyd George Management in Hong Kong. “I remember having treacle pudding or something… the sort of thing you wouldn’t expect in Hong Kong,” said the friend, while another noted that Rees-Mogg has a “very low opinion of Europeans.” While his wife will take their children for holidays around the continent, he will stay at home in Somerset. This paints the picture of the archetypal Little Englander, with extraordinarily closeted views as to Britain and its place in the world.

Rees-Mogg has previously exhibited his lack of understanding of Irish affairs as, responding to questions on post-Brexit border concerns, he stated “there would our ability, as we had during the Troubles, to have people inspected. It’s not a border that everyone has to go through everyday.” Exhibiting a total ignorance of the fact that not only do checks already exist on the border, but it is the fact that they are not nearly as noticeable nor as intrusive as during the Troubles which has people so worried that they could return. Furthermore, the notion that people do not have to cross the border everyday is laughable when one considers there are towns, and even houses, where the border runs down the middle.

The Conservative Party in general, and Rees-Mogg in particular, would do well to educate themselves on the life and times of Parnell. The man whom Gladstone referred to as “the most remarkable,” but not the ablest. For the first forty years of Parnell’s life not much happened. He had sought a parliamentary career because that’s what his class did if they fancied something to do. At his hustings to stand for Meath in 1875 he had a bad stutter and was actively laughed at as he tried to speak, but was voted for anyway as he had a good family name and money behind him. By the end of the decade he was known as the leader of the Irish in England and Scotland.

His success was partly, as Rees-Mogg alluded to, in his adoption of the obstructionist tactics which were first adopted by Joseph Biggars, MP for Cavan, who would read official documents at length, and at a low speaking level, in a bid to delay the passage of legislation through the House. The effect this had was that nothing could get done unless Ireland was given proper consideration. This is something that Sinn Féin ought to bear in mind. However, he was also the man who should be credited with the invention of the modern party whip system.

As the Conservative government is shedding MPs as a sickly fox sheds its fur, one would think it would have picked up a greater interest in the man who transformed the Home Rule movement, which ranged from the Land League to the militant Irish Republican Brotherhood, into “a well-knit political party of a modern type,” where MPs were bound to tight discipline, paid a salary, and the utmost of attention was afforded to constituency organisation and selection.

Furthermore, Robert Saunders in this week’s New Statesman, writes of the parallels between the Home Rule Crisis and the Brexit crisis. The former was of course of much higher stakes than the latter, as Ireland seemed to be on the brink of full-on civil war in 1914. Just as today, Parliament was divided, between the Liberals and the Conservatives, with a minority government reliant on a nationalist party for support. But the Conservatives, in their opposition to Home Rule, did not simply argue it was wrong but “rejected the democratic legitimacy of Parliament.” Members talked openly of “breaking the parliamentary machine,” and referred to the “supremacy of the people,” versus “paid puppets.”

The Home Rule era can teach us where an inert, or incompetent government, combined with a tense and emotional debate, tasked with undertaking vast constitutional reform, can end up. If Rees-Mogg, not to mention his colleagues, are at all wise they will be devouring the works of Irish historians from Paul Bew to Tim Pat Coogan.