Jacob Rees-Mogg is on a collision course with John Bercow – the only thing missing from this duel is the tricorn hats

No one except these two men and the clerks of the Commons will even understand the rules of the game, but the stakes could scarcely be higher. It will have echoes of the fight for parliamentary power against the crown in the 17th century

To borrow an old bit of political inverted snobbery, what an elegant anachronism Jacob Rees-Mogg is. Entertaining, too. On his first outing as leader of the House of Commons, he was charming, funny and obviously a highly learned student of parliamentary history. He even managed to raise a smile or two from the flinty-faced hard men and women of the Scottish National Party. Maybe that’s the benefit of an Eton education.

I am however greatly looking forward to the forthcoming no doubt highly courteous but nonetheless vicious scraps between the leader of the House of Commons and the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow. The leader of the house is supposed to represent parliament to the cabinet, and to stick up for it – though also bound by collective responsibility and the programme of the government. The speaker has no such conflicts of interest. He is there to stick up for the Commons. Full stop.

Over the coming weeks – during the short breaks when parliament actually is sitting – there will be a titanic struggle of the control of the business of the house. This is traditionally, though not quite constitutionally, reserved to the government, and outside a few opposition days and backbench business debates, private members bills and the like, the government and the leader of the house controls it.

What has happened recently is a series of parliamentary ambushes by dissident backbenchers to grab control over that business. The likes of Oliver Letwin, Hilary Benn, Dominic Grieve and Yvette Cooper have fought a guerrilla war to stop a no deal Brexit, with some success. They have been assisted in this by decisions made by Speaker Bercow. As a result, relations between Bercow and his predecessor Andrea Leadsom were often tetchy, or worse. On the whole, Bercow had the best of their exchanges.

This may not be so with JRM. It will be a duel, like something out of Poldark. Only the tricorn hats will be missing. A duel fought with elaborate and only partly sincere courtesies. A duel fought with the ammunition provided by the parliamentary manual, Erskine May. Precedents dating back to 1265 will be cited and counter-cited. Humble addresses may be deployed; amendments to bills too; adjournment debates, points of order terms and much more flummery. Skirmishes will be conducted in Latin and Norman French.

No one except these two men and the clerks of the Commons will even understand the rules of the game, but the stakes could scarcely be higher. It will have echoes of the fight for parliamentary power against the crown in the 17th century – the last time the power to prorogue power was seriously abused it gave England a civil war.

It is a tussle between direct democracy (the 2016 referendum) and representative democracy (the commons and the British constitution). The “will of the people" is continually and aggressively invoked by Boris Johnson, though Rees-Mogg prefers to stress the supremacy of parliament and that “we only speak our view by legislation”.

Both men, as Rees-Mogg says, share a “somewhat romantic view of the House of Commons”, but their confrontations will be anything but.