Even Jacob Rees-Mogg must realise it was a faintly ridiculous scenario. Dressed in one of his trademark double-breasted suits, he craned his neck over a perimeter wall and called out to a group of bemused foreign men in the mid-distance. ‘Hallo,’ he chirruped, ‘is this an illegal migrant place?’
Yet even if there is something almost comical about the footage of the Tory grandee, which has clocked up more than 500,000 views on YouTube, few are amused by the subject matter.
It was originally broadcast on his GB News programme State Of The Nation after he descended on Winford Manor, a former hotel in a secluded part of north Somerset now being used to accommodate unknown numbers of asylum seekers.
Rees-Mogg repeatedly tells viewers that the location is ‘in the middle of nowhere’. For that reason, he adds, it is ‘perhaps a good place to hide illegal migrants in’. It would also explain why the use of Winford Manor as an asylum hotel managed to slip under the national radar for almost three years.
After clips of Rees-Mogg peering into the grounds and trying to attract a security guard’s attention went viral, this idyllic corner of the West Country has emerged as the latest focal point in the debate over Britain’s broken asylum system.
