Jacob Rees-Mogg bowed out of asset management when he became the UK’s business minister in 2019. The firm he co-founded took a bit longer. Somerset Capital Management called it quits this week after the value of its investments fell below £1 billion, down from £10 billion five years ago. The proximate cause was the withdrawal of St James’s Place, one of its biggest clients. The real reason was a series of bad bets on emerging markets including India and China. All of which would be cause for no more than mild schadenfreude but for two things. First, SCM was a feeder school for not one minister but two – Rees-Mogg’s co-founder, Dominic Johnson, now naturally Lord Johnson, is minister of state for investment. Second, their shared fetish for risky markets far from home cost them and their clients dear and might even reflect a fundamental misapprehension about the way the world works. “Emerging markets are a box of frogs and you’re very much at the whim of geopolitical events,” a City analyst reminds the Telegraph. “There is less risk when building a fund management business around more developed markets.” How true. If Rees-Mogg had put his money in European tracker funds like this one, he could have made a return of nearly 50 per cent over the past five years.